Ben Bradshaw: As the hon. Lady knows, there has been a 9.4 per cent. INCREASE in funds available to PCTs in the last financial year. I take it that she was referring to the Healthcare Commission's report on hygiene standards at Barnet and Chase Farm—

David Tredinnick: I thank the Secretary of State for that reply and for writing to me about the regulation of Chinese medicine, which was helpful in setting a timetable. Does he accept that real problems are caused because the demand from patients is out of sync with the supply of services, especially in complementary and alternative medicine? Primary care trusts are not listening to patient demand. The situation is well illustrated in London, where the Royal London homeopathic hospital, which provides a range of services that go way beyond homeopathy, is being cut. If the Secretary of State really believes in patient choice, which is to be his flagship with his new broom Front Benchers— [ Interruption. ] Well, there are some new brooms, because all the old Ministers were sacked— [ Interruption. ] Well, most of them—a large proportion—were fired. Will the Secretary of State please consider issuing guidelines to primary care trusts to take patient choice into consideration?

Alan Johnson: There are two issues, the first of which is choice, which we want to extend. An important GP survey was published today and I made a written statement about it this morning. The second issue is maternity care, and recently, with the full support of the profession, we published "Maternity matters", which makes it absolutely clear that—as in so many other aspects of medical care—we cannot simply defend the status quo. We need to ensure that we configure our services so that we save the lives of more babies; for instance, in Manchester—although there is still an issue of contention that has yet to be concluded—there are proposals by local health care specialists and local clinicians to save the lives of 40 babies a year. Such evidence cannot be disregarded.

David Anderson: What discussions will be held with trade unions in the course of the NHS Review conducted by Sir Ara Darzi.

Alan Johnson: With due respect to the hon. Gentleman, I do not think that that is the primary concern about health services. My belief is that Baroness Royall will cover many of the questions. She will be accountable on behalf of the Government. I know that the hon. Gentleman thinks a lot about these things. It is to everyone's benefit to have someone of the reputation and skill of Lord Darzi, who will continue to practise two days a week, as well as meeting MPs individually and doing all the other things. He will continue to be a leading clinician in the health service and he will carry out the review, which will take up an awful lot of this time. It is innovative that not only do we have a clinician of his standing to lead the review—along with many other clinicians—we also have him as a Minister to ensure that, unlike with the Turner report or the Leitch report, we have someone in Government to carry the report through. That is of more interest to the public than who is answering questions in the Lords.

Ann Keen: What is important to local people is the consultation. I am aware that the hon. Gentleman was involved with that and has met representatives from his primary care trust to discuss the issue. That is what I encourage him to do, because that is what he believes in. He believes in local accountability, and that is what he has in his constituency. As a founder member of the Cornerstone group, surely he agrees with removing decision making from Whitehall and making it into local accountability.

Ann Keen: The hon. Gentleman raises an important issue on accident and emergency services, but how could I possibly know who was attending the accident and emergency department without looking at the figures? I would expect the local management and the local PCT to do that, and I would expect the local MP to conduct a responsible consultation to ensure that patient care is delivered appropriately in accident and emergency department. That is why reconfiguration of the health service can be good for patients, as I am sure he would agree.

Ann Keen: I suggest that as the local Member of Parliament, the hon. Gentleman engages in a serious conversation with the PCT and that a consultation is carried out with the local community. I am sure that that would help them to decide their future.

Ann Keen: I suggest that the PCT looks at excellent examples that are in progress throughout the country. I am happy to direct the PCT to examine those at any time my hon. Friend likes.

Ruth Kelly: With permission, I would like to make a statement about how the Government intend to strengthen the country's railways over the next seven years and beyond. Our proposal is the most ambitious strategy for growth on the railways in more than 50 years. This statement is being made against a background not of decline or crisis, as in the past, but of remarkable success for our railway network.
	Of course, anyone who travels regularly by rail, as many of us in the House do, will know that big challenges remain before our country has the rail system that it needs. There is no room for complacency, but the measures put in place since the Hatfield tragedy mean that our railways are safer than ever before. Reliability, which declined sharply after Hatfield, is improving strongly on most lines and passenger satisfaction has improved. There has been sustained investment in the network, such as in the modernisation of the west coast main line and in new rolling stock. The result is that more freight and more people are travelling by rail than at any time for 50 years.
	Our challenge today is not about managing decline. Instead, it is about how we can build on that solid progress to provide a railway that carries more passengers on more and better trains, and on more frequent, reliable, safe and affordable services. That needs the Government, working with the industry, the regulator and passenger groups, to take action in three main areas: first, to secure continued improvements in safety and reliability; secondly, to achieve a major increase in capacity to meet rising demand; and thirdly, to deliver sustained investment through a fair deal for passengers and the taxpayer. Let me take each in turn.
	Safety has improved and reliability is back to the levels seen before Hatfield, even though we are running many more trains. Those who work on our railways deserve credit for their focus. The White Paper sets out how we intend to continue reducing the risks to passengers and staff on our railways. We also intend to build on the improvements in reliability. Currently, 88 per cent. of services arrive on time. By 2014, I want that figure to reach 92.6 per cent., through investment in new rolling stock, maintenance and equipment, which would make our railway one of the most reliable in Europe. For the first time, we will require the industry to concentrate on cutting by one quarter delays of more than 30 minutes, which cause the most inconvenience to passengers.
	As safety and reliability have improved, passenger numbers have increased, and overcrowding has become a real issue for many commuters. The White Paper contains the biggest single commitment for a generation to increasing the capacity of the railway through more services and longer trains. By 2014, we will have invested £10 billion to make this happen. Starting now, and over the next seven years, we will see: 1,300 new carriages to ease overcrowding in London and other cities such as Birmingham, Cardiff, Leeds and Manchester; £600 million investment to tackle bottlenecks at Birmingham New Street and Reading stations; the £5.5 billion transformation of Thameslink, which provides a vital north-south artery into and across London; and new plans put in place for the development of each of our main lines, including the next generation of inter-city trains and signalling. The Government are also committed to ensuring that we close no rural lines in this period.
	This continued investment will provide nearly 100,000 new seats for passengers on inter-city and commuter trains to our major cities. Our proposals will accommodate a further seven years of record passenger growth and, at the same time, start to tackle some of the worst overcrowding on some of our busiest services. There will be some 14,500 more seats in the peak hour on Thameslink alone and, while Crossrail remains subject to financial and parliamentary approval, it has the potential to deliver a similar scale of improvement for east-west services in the capital.
	The White Paper also outlines other improvements that groups such as Passenger Focus tell us that passengers want to see. These include a radical simplification of the fares structure and the modernisation of tickets to allow people to use smartcards; a further £150 million to be spent on 150 stations in the towns and cities outside London that form the backbone of the national network; better and safer stations from Wolverhampton to Dartmouth, Cleethorpes to Swansea, and Barking to Chester; and support for Transport 2000's idea of local station plans so that people can better access the railway and make it part of a greener travel choice. We are also investing £200 million in a strategic freight network that will help to reduce the congestion on our roads and the environmental impact of moving goods.
	Sustained investment will be needed to underpin all this. Having fought its way back on to a stable financial footing following the demise of Railtrack, it is essential that the industry maintain financial discipline. Both passengers and taxpayers have suffered the consequences of financial crises, and we will not allow a return to those days. The challenge is to deliver the sustained investment that the rail system needs while continuing to protect passengers, but we must also strike a fair balance between the call on taxpayers and fare payers. Because we are determined to continue to protect passengers, any increases in regulated ticket prices will remain capped at the retail prices index plus 1 per cent. Such tickets account for over half the use of the railway and include season tickets and saver fares.
	There has been some recent debate about unregulated fares, which operators can vary to respond to customer demand. Some unregulated ticket prices have therefore increased. This is something that I will monitor closely and today I am committing to give Passenger Focus more say in the specification of future franchises before they are tendered. At the same time, many other tickets have been discounted. In fact, about 80 per cent. of passengers do not use the headline-catching first and peak tickets, but buy either a regulated ticket or a discounted product. A significant number of those fares have fallen in real terms over the past 10 years, with many deals cheaper in cash terms than they were under British Rail.
	The result is that many more people are now choosing to travel by rail—some 340 million more passengers each year than in 1997. This strong growth also means that the railways need less taxpayer subsidy. In the difficult years of Railtrack, it was the taxpayer who footed the bill. The proportion of subsidy funding nearly doubled in five years. It is right that we now seek to return it closer to historic levels. I believe that we are meeting our goals of protecting passengers and achieving a fair balance between the taxpayer and the travelling public, while delivering the necessary investment that we all agree is necessary.
	Today's White Paper sets out our ambition for a railway capable of carrying double the number of passengers and twice the amount of freight by 2030, with modern trains and a network whose reliability and safety are among the best in Europe. This is not a White Paper that rests on distant promises of all-or-nothing projects. Schemes such as new north-south lines may have their place, and we will consider them if and as the need arises. This is a strategy that seeks to deliver real improvements that reflect passengers' priorities and that builds on the real achievements and successes of our rail system over the past decade.
	Twenty-five years ago, our railways were advertising "This is the age of the train", but it was against a background of falling demand and chronic underinvestment in trains and infrastructure. Perhaps that claim was premature. If we can build on the progress of the past 10 years, with sustained investment and increased capacity while harnessing the full environmental gains of rail transport, we will be entering a new and exciting era of rail travel. This White Paper is a resounding vote of confidence in Britain's railways and I commend it to the House.

Susan Kramer: The statement has been a disappointment. There has been a failure to recognise that there is huge pent-up demand for rail. Those of us who truly believe in the green agenda and saw the statement as providing a chance to divert passengers from air and road to rail consider it to be a missed opportunity. I therefore wish to ask the Secretary of State a number of questions.
	What is new in the statement—what has not been announced before in the 10-year Transport Plan 2000, the Strategic Rail Authority plan 2002 or the Network Rail business plan 2007? What new funds have been committed over and above what has previously been announced? The director general of the Association of Train Operating Companies, George Muir, has said that funding for longer trains can be expected to come from "growing passenger revenues". What proportion of that will come from increases in passenger numbers and what from increases in passenger fares? Some commuters have experienced 20 per cent. fare increases. What are the statement's implications for unregulated fares, and for increases in them?
	The Secretary of State said that no seats would be taken out to provide additional capacity. Will she pass that information on to South West Trains, which seems hellbent on removing seats from stock on the lines that pass through my constituency?
	An answer to a question I tabled earlier this month contained the admission that the cost of driving had decreased by 10 per cent. in real terms over the past 30 years while the cost of using buses and the railways has increased by more than 50 per cent. Given the importance of climate change, as highlighted in the Stern report, what level of diversion will what has been announced achieve from internal flights and roads to rail? What shift of freight from road to rail will there be under the strategy? Is the £200 million new money, and what will it buy us?
	Which of the bottlenecks identified in the Network Rail business plan 2007 are not addressed or funded in this strategy? Thinking of my own constituency, I would be grateful if the Secretary of State could tell us what is to happen to Waterloo and Eurostar. It is extraordinary that we did not have more detail on Crossrail, especially when the opportunity presented itself to confirm the Government's commitment to adequate funding to take the project forward.
	Given that the 2005 Labour manifesto promised us high-speed rail, why are the Government ignoring the Atkins report on high-speed rail that has already shown that north-south capacity around Birmingham will reach capacity by 2014? That presents only a tentative possibility of looking at that line seriously.
	I note that the Secretary of State promises better and safer stations from Wolverhampton to Dartmouth. She might be interested to know, from Wikipedia, that no railway has ever run to Dartmouth. The town does have a railway station, but it is now a restaurant. There is a steam railway that runs Thomas the Tank Engine. I make those remarks simply to try to illustrate that there is so much in this report that is clever phrasing: will the Secretary of State be kind enough to tell us what it will actually deliver?

Ruth Kelly: My hon. Friend makes an important point, and the Rail Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, South (Mr. Harris), has already offered to meet her and a delegation on this issue. It is important that we develop local services, and indeed rural services where there is demand for those services. This is the first White Paper that I know of that has said on the Government's behalf that there will be no closures in local or rural lines. We have also set aside some of the new carriages to meet increasing demand on those lines if that demand occurs, but my hon. Friend will be very happy to meet her to discuss it.

Ruth Kelly: I will of course look at any proposal that an hon. Member puts before me, but I urge the hon. Gentleman to think about the potential costs of any improvements that he may suggest, because, ultimately, they have to be funded either by the taxpayer or by the fare-payer—or we will be unable to deliver the investment. I have yet to hear a plausible exposition of an Opposition policy that would enable greater investment in capacity.

Ruth Kelly: I am afraid that cannot give my right hon. Friend that assurance. He knows that those issues are for the Scottish Executive and not Westminster politicians—

Edward Vaizey: Like other hon. Members, I have also been lobbying on my constituents' behalf in respect of the First Great Western main line, so the news about the improvements at Reading is very welcome. Will the Secretary of State say when they will be completed, and update us on other important improvements, such as increasing capacity at Oxford and improving access to Paddington? Finally, what is the prospect of getting a station at Grove?

Ruth Kelly: It is remarkable how representations from Opposition Back Benchers differ so profoundly from what Front-Bench Members say. Opposition Back Benchers have stood up and welcomed what is in today's White Paper, and even added to the proposals by asking for more investment and capacity improvements, but I have yet to hear those on the Front Bench make a credible proposition about how they would fund the improvements. We have set aside more than £425 million for Reading station in the control period from 2009 to 2014. That will deliver significant improvements for the hon. Gentleman's constituents.

Hilary Benn: With permission, Mr. Speaker, I would like to make a brief further statement to update the House on the serious flooding that is affecting central and southern England. I apologise to those on the Opposition Front Benches for the short time that they have had the statement in advance, but as I am sure Members will appreciate, the situation is changing rather fast.
	Cobra met yesterday evening and again first thing this morning. The most serious issue that we have been facing is the potential flooding of the Walham switching station, which would result in power cuts to hundreds of thousands of people and the potential further loss of pumped water supplies. I am pleased to tell the House that this has so far been avoided, thanks to the heroic efforts of the Environment Agency, armed forces, fire service and others who built the temporary defence around the site on Sunday and who have been working to pump water out since.
	Although the Environment Agency advises that the River Severn has now peaked, the weather outlook remains unsettled. This includes the possibility of further heavy rain in the flood-affected areas in the days ahead. Those on the site will continue to do all that can be done to protect Walham, and we have been making contingency arrangements for continuity of essential services and supplies, should the need arise.
	I am also able to report that the Castlemeads electricity substation has now been brought back into operation, so restoring power to more than 48,000 properties in Gloucestershire. There remain 223 properties in Tewkesbury without power, and it is hoped to have them reconnected later this afternoon. There are also 134 properties in Gloucester and three in Cheltenham which are without power, I am advised.
	However, this emergency is still not over and the River Thames continues to cause concern. There was further flooding in Abingdon last night, but no additional significant flooding in the rest of Oxfordshire is now expected. There will, however, be peak flows during the next 24 to 36 hours further down the river, and flooding in Henley, Reading and other riverside properties to Marlow and Windsor may be unavoidable. The Environment Agency is continuing to make efforts to reduce potential flood damage and an evacuation centre is being prepared in Reading. The Jubilee river has protected several hundred properties in Maidenhead.
	A total of 140,000 properties remain without mains water following the flooding of the Mythe water treatment works at Tewkesbury. Distribution of water is now the priority. Since yesterday, Severn Trent has deployed about 500 bowsers, and the company says that that will rise to 900 by tomorrow morning. Eighty tankers are available to keep those bowsers and static tanks topped up, and a further 20 tankers are being organised under mutual aid agreements. Three million litres of bottled water a day are being made available, and the Army is helping with distribution. Priority is being given to hospitals and vulnerable groups. Advice is being issued to householders on how to cope with the loss of mains water supply. Severn Trent does not expect full water supply to be restored for some days. However, it hopes to gain access to the Mythe works today to assess the situation and to make a start on putting a flood barrier around the works to enable water to be pumped out. That should allow work to start on restoring the plant as soon as possible.
	I am only too aware, as are all Members of the House, of the very considerable human distress that many people are experiencing, with homes and businesses ruined. I want to pay tribute to the extraordinary community effort as people are helping their neighbours. The Minister for Local Government, my hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth (John Healey), visited Gloucester and Tewkesbury today, and the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the hon. Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Jonathan Shaw) was in Reading this morning.
	I informed the House yesterday that the revised Bellwin rules will assist local authorities in the areas affected to cover the costs of dealing with the flooding and its immediate aftermath. I can today tell the House that the Government will supplement the existing £14 million flood recovery grant fund with up to a further £10 million, which will be made available to affected local authorities on the same basis.
	Finally, I will be holding a briefing meeting for Members of Parliament of constituencies affected in the Moses Room at 5.30 pm today. Officials from the Environment Agency, civil contingencies unit and other departments will be there to provide further details of what is being done, to answer questions, and to pick up particular issues that I know that Members will wish to raise. I hope that this will be helpful.

Elliot Morley: I thank my right hon. Friend for keeping the House so well informed, and also for the money made available to north Lincolnshire, which has been used very wisely by the North Lincolnshire council to help flood victims. Does he agree that it is not the case that reports are not being acted on? Going back to 1998, the Bye report led to improved contingency arrangements, and "Making space for water" brought about changes in planning and institutional change, and strengthened the role of the Environment Agency. There have been huge improvements over those years. Although the Government are involved through the public sector, it is important to recognise that there are private sector players, particularly in respect of infrastructure. I welcome what my right hon. Friend said about the inquiry and the need to look further into co-ordination and adaptation of the central infrastructure in flood risk areas.

Hilary Benn: I have not yet read that particular report, but as the hon. Gentleman has raised it I undertake to go away and have a look at it, and do my best to answer the question. I thank him for what he said about the efforts that have been made to help his constituents who have been affected.

James Duddridge: I beg to move,
	That leave be given to bring in a Bill to make provision for offences relating to graffiti; and for connected purposes.
	The Bill has two parts. It is aimed at bringing the perpetrators of the criminal act of graffiti to justice, in terms of restorative justice, by getting them first to clear up the graffiti and secondly to meet their victims. That could have a massive impact on our towns, communities, villages and roads.
	Mayor Giuliani in New York identified broken windows as an early indicator of the decline of society at street level. There is a similar decline in society at street level caused by graffiti. The Bill seeks to address that problem. It has cross-party support, and I especially thank the hon. Members for Wigan (Mr. Turner) and for Birmingham, Yardley (John Hemming), who have been involved in drafting some of the detail. The Bill also has support from several national groups, including ENCAMS, which is known for the Keep Britain Tidy campaign. It also has the support of the British Transport police and the Restorative Justice Consortium.
	Graffiti has a precise definition, and it is criminal damage under the Criminal Damage Act 1971. Unfortunately, it is classified as "other criminal damage", so it is difficult to estimate the exact size of the problem. However, it is estimated that more than 50 per cent. of that category is graffiti. Other estimates suggest that only 30 per cent. to 40 per cent. of graffiti is reported.
	The Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003 defines graffiti well as
	"painting, writing, soiling, marking or other defacing by whatever means".
	Hon. Members will know that the principal problem is not so-called graffiti art, but tagging, and it is on that issue that I shall concentrate—although graffiti art, whether one calls it art or not, if done on a private wall without the permission of the owner, is still criminal damage, under the 1971 Act.
	There is a massive social and financial cost to graffiti, and I shall deal first with the social cost. It is not only an eyesore but a permanent reminder of the decline in society. Paradoxically, those who are most affected are those who are least likely to be the victims of crime—the elderly and the vulnerable. It is as if there are two parallel universes—one of the perpetrators of such crimes, who are mostly young males, and the other of the older members of our community, who are so intimidated by those crimes.
	In 2001 the English house condition survey, produced by the then Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, estimated that 500,000 households or dwellings had graffiti daubed on their walls. Poorer neighbourhoods were the worst affected, with a fifth of residents citing problems with graffiti—twice as many as elsewhere.
	The financial costs of graffiti are difficult to pin down exactly, because so many people are affected—companies, local authorities, the British Transport police, train operating companies, Transport for London, utility companies, voluntary organisations and, particularly important, people's homes. In Southend the local authority spends more than £120,000 a year clearing up graffiti, but that grossly underestimates the costs for local authorities as statutory organisations. The police estimate that at least 10 officers in Southend deal with that criminal activity, at a cost of about £500,000. Furthermore, in terms of broader antisocial behaviour and damage, there are costs of £500,000 for closed circuit television.
	The hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley estimates that the costs for Birmingham are more than £1 million. The most stunning figure, which probably underrepresented the problem and now needs updating in any case, was given in 2000 by a previous Home Secretary, who stated that the cost was in excess of £1 billion. It is probably much more now.
	How would the Bill work? At present, youth and adult courts can use restorative justice as part of the sentencing process. I want that made mandatory. In addition, we need to catch people earlier. From the youth perspective that would be at the reprimand or warning stage, and for adults it would be at the point of caution, when the offender has already admitted criminal damage. The Bill proposes to make all such cautions conditional on participation in restorative justice. The principal change would be to move from ad hoc action to a strong statutory position to catch everyone.
	Restorative justice works. At present it is available to only 1 per cent. of the population, but more than 40 per cent. of victims want to meet the offender. Between 75 and 95 per cent. of victims—depending on which study we read—said that they were satisfied with the restorative justice process.
	The perpetrators of those criminal acts need to understand that there are two elements in the damage they do—the physical and the emotional. On the physical element, they need to be involved in clearing up the graffiti. It may not always be possible or appropriate to clear up the site that they have damaged but they should have to clean up somewhere. The Restorative Justice Consortium has excellent examples showing how such schemes work powerfully, and ENCAMS works with the National Offender Management Service and Crime Concern on projects such as Thames21. In some areas, parents are involved in the process. They see their son—it is usually a son rather than a daughter—doing the work, which broadens the family's responsibility.
	The most powerful part of the Bill is the second aspect—the emotional element—which involves the offender meeting the victim. Not all victims want to meet the perpetrator close up, even in a facilitated, multi-agency situation, but it is possible for victims of similar crimes to meet that perpetrator. In Southend, Karon Grant, who is charged with the team clearing up graffiti, spends a lot of her time in restorative justice panels explaining the impact of the crime to children, mums and dads and other adults.
	I am sure that Members cannot understand why people commit the criminal act of graffiti, but a large number of offenders genuinely do not think that they are doing anything wrong. They do not understand that their actions are against the law, so bringing them face to face with their victims can help them to do so.
	The Bill could have some costs. Reparative services and restorative justice panels cost about £500 a person, but the most up-to-date statistics produced by the Ministry of Justice show how powerful such schemes are. The Bill would initially introduce a pilot to prove that the money that we spend on this is saved in other areas, but logically this should make an awful lot of sense, and locally it does seem to be working in Southend.
	In addition, Transport for London has a rather innovative scheme, in which it attempts civil recovery from the offender. That has two real advantages: money comes back into the system that can be spent on graffiti prevention, or if the perpetrator of the crime is unable or unwilling to pay the fine, they end up with a county court judgment against them, which provides a further deterrent to other individuals to commit this crime.
	In conclusion, this is a billion-pound problem looking for a practical and effective solution. The Bill is part of that solution. It will change the attitudes and behaviour of offenders for the benefit of the offenders and the benefit of society. In the unlikely event that this ten-minute rule Bill does not go further, I will seek, on a cross-party basis, to amend the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill to the same end.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	Bill ordered to be brought in by James Duddridge, Mr. Neil Turner, John Hemming, Daniel Kawczynski, Ian Lucas, Mr. Roger Gale, Mr. Greg Hands, Mr. Roger Williams, Sammy Wilson, Mr. Lindsay Hoyle, Richard Burden and Lynne Jones.

Nick Herbert: I beg to move,
	That this House considers that the Government's management of the prison system has become a national disgrace; believes that the Government by ignoring official projections of the prison population and failing to plan for sufficient capacity has allowed jails to become overcrowded, reconviction rates to rise and the Probation Service to become overstretched; further considers that the Government's resort to releasing prisoners early, including violent offenders, without risk assessment or accommodation checks is wholly unacceptable; notes that many of those released under the scheme have previously been refused release on Home Detention Curfew and that others have already re-offended when they should have been in custody; is concerned that offenders are also being transferred early to open prisons from which they can and do abscond at any time and that over 4,000 offenders released early on electronic tags have re-offended, committing over 1,000 violent crimes; further believes that the modest additional prison capacity announced by the Government will be insufficient; and calls upon the Government to halt the End of Custody Licence scheme and take immediate steps to ensure adequate prison capacity, the proper treatment and rehabilitation of offenders, and the safety of the British public.
	I am not surprised that the Government appear to have done their level best to minimise debate on this issue today. The first duty of any Government is to protect the public. Let us be clear about what that means. It means that if a Government Minister issues an instruction to release offenders early from prison, and those offenders go on to commit crimes, the public quite obviously have not been protected and Ministers have failed in their duty.
	The early release of prisoners is "simply wrong"—not my words but those of the former Lord Chancellor, just weeks before he announced the scheme. So much for rebuilding trust in politics. Already, 2,000 prisoners have been released early on to the streets, equivalent to two prisons. They have been released without risk assessment, without accommodation checks, even though it is a requirement of the scheme that they have an address to go to. Nearly 1,400 of them have previously been refused release on home custody detention; apparently those offenders were unsuitable for release early with an electronic tag, but it is perfectly acceptable to release them on to the streets with no tag.
	A fifth of the offenders released in the first week had committed crimes sufficiently serious that they were jailed for over a year. Three hundred and forty-four of them were violent offenders. The Prime Minister says that they had not committed serious violence, so apparently that makes their release acceptable. People who are jailed for violent assault or causing actual bodily harm are apparently entirely suitable to release from our prisons early. Well, it might be all right by the Government that more than 300 violent offenders have been tipped out of jail, but it is not all right by the public and it is not all right by us.
	One hundred and forty-nine of those released had been in prison for burglary; 22 for robbery; more than 400 for theft; and 65 for drug offences. The Government do not even know what 32 of those released were imprisoned for in the first place. The former Prime Minister repeatedly said that the scheme would be temporary; the new Lord Chancellor says that it might be permanent. That is a measure of Ministers' grip on the prison system.
	Now we know that at least six of the released prisoners committed crimes, including two offenders who carried out a robbery while on their way to see a probation officer. What was their original crime: assaulting a police officer, which was not considered serious enough, according to the Prime Minister, to merit an apology. Eighteen early release prisoners still remain unlawfully at large.
	Our position is unequivocal: those offenders should never have been released early in the first place, still less with more than £200 in their back pockets. That was their reward for getting out of prison early, and it is why the National Association of Probation Officers says that offenders are queuing up to get on to the scheme.
	When he announced the scheme on 19 June, the Minister said:
	"release on licence is not the same as Executive release. Releasing people on licence means that their sentence continues."—[ Official Report, 19 June 2007; Vol. 461, c. 1242.]
	Even by this Government's standards, that is remarkable spin. How can an offender's sentence be continuing if he is let out of jail, free to commit other offences? As the Prison Officers Association said,
	"The fact that they're not calling it executive release is just word games."

Nick Herbert: How does the hon. Gentleman think that the 18 offenders who have not been tracked down will be recalled? As far as the public are concerned, those offenders are not continuing their sentence; they are free, out on the streets and able to commit further offences, which they could not otherwise have committed if they had been behind bars.
	We all know why the Government are releasing prisoners earlier: the prisons are full. The reason why they are full is that the Government, not least the Lord Chancellor, repeatedly ignored warnings that more capacity would be needed. As long ago as 1992, in his report on the Strangeways riot, Lord Woolf warned that the prison population would double from 44,000 to well above current levels by next year, 2008. In 2000, when the current Lord Chancellor was Home Secretary, his officials predicted that the prison population would be at current levels by this year. Two years later, the lowest Home Office projection for the prison population today was 5,000 above the current capacity. The Government were told that greater capacity was needed, and they simply ignored the projections. Their great claim is to have provided another 20,000 prison places. Well, let us examine that claim.
	Only three new prisons in the past 10 years were commissioned by the Labour Government; the rest were commissioned by the previous Conservative Administration. In the year when the Government came to power, the number of new prison places was 4,716. By 2005, the number of new places had fallen to 940. During the current Lord Chancellor's watch, prison capacity building fell by 86 per cent. over three years. The Government also tell us that they are providing an additional 9,500 prison places by 2012, but on their own projections, that will not be enough. Total capacity will still be 4,000 places short of their medium projection for the prison population by that time, assuming that prisons will be full to the gunnels, with prisoners continuing to be doubled up. As Harry Fletcher of the National Association of Probation Officers said,
	"They've had eight, nine years and really done nothing... There's been no substantial building programme and no provision for probation."

Alan Beith: The hon. Gentleman prayed in aid Lord Woolf, but he should not forget that Lord Woolf also said:
	"no solution will be really effective, apart from reducing prison population... building more prisons is not the solution, not least because it means that more and more resources are being sucked into the hugely expensive process of building prisons",
	instead of
	"making effective non-prison sentences".

Nick Herbert: I strongly agree with my hon. Friend. One of the worst effects of the early release scheme is that it undermines public confidence in sentencing, just as the Government undermined it in relation to their changes to determinate sentences, which mean that there is automatic early release after half the sentence is served—a proposal that we opposed.
	Ten years ago, the present Lord Chancellor said that indeterminate sentences gave
	"justice, above all for the victim, but also for the offender."—[ Official Report, 19 June 1996; Vol. 279, c. 902.]
	Now he wants to review those sentences. Perhaps he should have a word with the Home Secretary about his plans. Only last Thursday, she was berating hon. Members for not supporting the sentences. The former Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett) is worried. In his column for  The Sun he said:
	"It's no time for a u-turn on crime...what has been happening since the fragmentation of the Home Office...?"
	He said that the Home Secretary
	"has no control...over the froth that's being talked about indeterminate sentences".
	That is the problem with splitting the Home Office, which is no doubt why the current Secretary of State for Justice opposed the idea last year. One Department talks tough and the other lets prisoners out early.
	The right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside was right about another thing: the new Prime Minister shares the blame for the current crisis in our prisons. In his diaries, the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside describes the 2004 spending review, in which the then Chancellor would agree to fund only two thirds of the additional prison places requested. The then Chancellor removed the Home Office from the current spending review and froze its budget. Clearly, in his judgment law and order was not a priority. That is why we have the catastrophe of overcrowded prisons. Some 17,000 prisoners are doubling up in cells—twice as many as when Labour came to power. More than 1,000 cells designed for two people are occupied by three. That means that nearly a quarter of the entire prison population is housed in cells designed for one fewer person. The price of such overcrowding is that the rehabilitation of offenders is made impossible. As the prison service annual report says:
	"Crowding...dilutes the resource available for constructive activity. High throughput and frequent daily movement impact directly on regime delivery by diverting staff resources and making it more difficult to assess prisoners and allocate them to appropriate interventions."
	The number of prison officers has risen at only half the rate of the increase in the prison population, and prisoners are being transferred early to open prisons. Last summer, the governor of Ford open prison in my constituency warned that the transfer of prisoners who should really be in category C conditions
	"will mean almost inevitably that the abscond rate will go up."
	She went on to say:
	"Ministers have apparently been briefed to this effect and are taking this risk."
	The chief inspector of prisons too has warned that high-risk offenders are being transferred to open prisons, some without any proper risk assessment. Murderers are walking out of open prisons at will. In an overstretched probation service, some officers supervise up to 80 offenders and, as a result, reconviction rates have soared. Of the people discharged from prison, 65 per cent. reoffend within two years—up from 59 per cent. in 1998. Among young people, the recidivism rate is even higher. Reoffending accounts for more than half of all crime.

Nick Herbert: The problem is that the prison governor made that proposal behind the backs of people in the local community. Uniquely, they have an agreement with the prison not to house more serious offenders locally. I think that the local community would be willing to have a higher category prison located in the area, but only if the debate is held openly with them. In my view, it was disgraceful of the governor to make that proposal at the same time that she was negotiating renewal of the agreement with the local authority. I think that the right hon. Gentleman should be careful before he asks other hon. Members about matters to do with their constituencies.
	The Government's social exclusion unit has estimated the cost of reoffending to the taxpayer at more than £11 billion a year. It is essential that that depressing spiral is broken. Nearly one fifth of prisoners have been convicted of drugs offences, and drugs are rife in prisons. Ninety per cent. of prisoners have a significant mental health problem. Prison suicides have leaped this year, but we will never deal with such problems without adequate prison capacity.

Nick Herbert: I agree with my hon. Friend, and one of the ironies of the current early release scheme is that it does not apply to foreign nationals. One would have thought an obvious way to deal with the overcrowding problem would be to remove foreign national prisoners more swiftly, perhaps before the end of their sentences. That would be preferable to releasing domestic prisoners and putting them out on the streets, where they are able to reoffend.
	As I said, 90 per cent. of prisoners have a significant mental health problem, something that we will never deal with without adequate prison capacity. Not only have the Government missed their own pitifully low target to reduce overcrowding, but they appear to be complacent about the situation. The Prime Minister was barely briefed on the matter last week, and the Minister with responsibility for prisons, the Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr. Hanson), told "The Westminster Hour" on Sunday that
	"in general terms, the Labour Government has got it right now."
	What could he have meant by that? What does he think is "right" about the prisons being at bursting point? Last year, the Lord Chancellor said that he was proud of the Government's record on law and order in that respect. Is pride what he feels when he learns that prisoners whom he has released have committed robbery?
	In the biography of the former Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside, an "adviser" famously remarks:
	"God alone knows what Jack Straw did for four years..."
	He added that the Home Office was "a giant mess." Actually, we know what he did. He talked tough on sentencing, but he failed to build prisons. He promised action on violent crime, but it soared by a third. He said that he would protect the public, but he let prisoners out on tags, and they committed the most serious offences. In spite of my belief in rehabilitation, when it comes to his record, I am afraid that the Lord Chancellor is a serial offender who has no chance of going straight.
	The Lord Chancellor should have begun his new role with an urgent meeting with the Prime Minister to review capacity. He should have looked at the thousands of foreign nationals who remain in our prisons and asked why more are not being deported. He should have asked what happened to the prison ship Weare, which was bought by the Home Office for £3.7 million, and skilfully sold off last year for a rumoured £2 million. Instead, within days of taking office, he released hundreds of violent offenders on to the streets. The Government's management of the prison system has become nothing less than a national disgrace. They are failing prisoners, who cannot be rehabilitated in overcrowded conditions. They are failing the staff, who are being asked to do an almost impossible job. Above all, they are failing the public, whom the Government are putting at risk.

Jack Straw: I beg to move, To leave out from "House" to the end of the Question, and to add instead thereof:
	"welcomes the record of the Government which has since 1997 cut crime, reformed the penal system, invested in record prison places, created a legislative framework which provides tough and effective sentences, introduced risk assessment and offender management systems, introduced and seen ever increasing numbers of offenders complete accredited programmes, enabled record numbers of offenders to pay back to the community through unpaid work, ensured that offenders in the community who pose a risk to the public are recalled to custody, radically reformed the youth justice system and brought the prison and probation services together under the National Offender Management Service with a renewed focus on protecting the public and reducing re-offending."
	I welcome this debate, and I am grateful to the Opposition for enabling it, because there is no more important priority for this Government—and, I hope, all Governments—than ensuring the safety of our citizens. I am proud of our achievements in that respect. The hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) forgot to mention that over the past 10 years, crime has fallen by 35 per cent. There are record numbers of police, and the chances of being a victim of crime are the lowest for 25 years. We have provided 20,000 new prison places and will be building another 9,500. More offences and offenders than ever before—over 1.3 million in 2006—are being brought to justice. More of the most violent and dangerous offenders are being sent to jail for longer.
	That record contrasts starkly with that of the Conservatives in their 18 years in government. They failed: in their 18 years in government, crime doubled, police numbers fell, and the number of people convicted plummeted by a third, with only one crime in 50 leading to a conviction. The party's complacency was insulting to the British people, who responded by evicting it from office. Ten years later, the Conservatives' approach is just as incoherent as it was back in 1997. They have talked tough, but they failed to support many of the measures that we introduced to cut crime. They opposed tougher sentences for murder, and for sexual and violent offences. They opposed indeterminate sentences for those who commit serious sexual or violence offences. They opposed the new five-year minimum custodial sentences for unauthorised possession of firearms, and at first they dismissed our antisocial behaviour measures as gimmicks. For all their fancy words about more prison places, the Opposition have consistently voted against the taxation and public spending that would allow any new prisons to be built.

Jack Straw: I am afraid that I cannot provide the hon. and learned Gentleman with all the information, but some of the places are in new prisons. Some are in additional units in existing prisons, and some are the result of doubling or trebling in prison cells, which is far better— [Interruption.] I thought that the Opposition, too, were in favour of making the best use of existing accommodation, which is what we have done. The number of rehabilitation courses that prisoners have been able to take has vastly increased since the Conservative Administration.
	Later, we will come on to the details of the pledges made by the hon. Gentleman, who continues to imply what the shadow Home Secretary has made explicit. The shadow Home Secretary has offered to "spend what it takes" to build new prisons. He admits that he has no idea how much that is, but we can give him all the calculations that he needs.
	At the same time, the Conservatives have made wild pledges to cut—not to increase—£21 billion of public spending. They disagree with one another about what their policy should be. The shadow Home Secretary is dreaming up uncosted plans for new prisons, while the hon. and learned Gentleman who adorns the Front Bench is saying that prison is not the answer and is calling for a review of sentencing. The hon. and learned Gentleman says that he is on a massive "voyage of discovery", but that voyage is clearly taking place on a mystical vessel crowded out with Conservative Front Benchers, all heading for some fantasy island, with just one problem—they have no captain, no map, no compass and they cannot agree on whether to go forward, back, left or right.
	There is, I will concede, one thing on which the Conservatives do agree—they want new prisons, but they do not want them in their own back yard. The hon. Member for Hornchurch (James Brokenshire), for example, a shadow Home Affairs Minister, says that he wants more prisons, as long as they are not in his parliamentary constituency, Hornchurch, where a plan for a prison in Rainham is, apparently, "wholly inappropriate". We have a little indication that the hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs is in the same position. Even when there is a proposal to increase the category of his open prison at Ford from D to C—yes, to relieve some overcrowding, by making it more secure—he says that he is wholly opposed to that as well.

Humfrey Malins: I say straight away to the right hon. Gentleman that over the years I have had a great deal of respect for the way that he has approached these matters, particularly when he was Home Secretary. The Opposition are not always right, and the Government are not always right. There is much to be said for moving forward in a consensual way sometimes. One of the Government's experiments with night courts at Bow street, for example, was something of a disaster and had to be abandoned. Occasionally, things go wrong.

Jack Straw: Indeed, I blame the hon. and learned Member for Harborough, not the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Garston (Maria Eagle).
	The end of custody licence involves the early release of prisoners serving less than four years 18 days—just two and a half weeks—before the date when they would have been released in any event. In other words, eligible prisoners due in normal circumstances to come out today, 24 July, would, under the scheme, have been released on 6 July. I understand the point about the reassurance of the public, so it is important to put this into context.
	Overall, average determinate sentence lengths for adults discharged from prison have increased by more than two months since 1995, and notwithstanding home detention curfew, the average time spent in prison has also increased from 14.7 months in 1995 to 16.8 months in 2005. That obviously does not take account of the effect of ECL, but ECL cannot have any significant effect on those numbers. The hon. Gentleman is dining out on the fact that prisoners are being released early, which they have been under all systems of sentencing.
	Although it now appears that the Opposition are about to change their mind, as I will explain, I would advise them to continue with a system under which, if prisoners earn good behaviour and have to be reintroduced to the community, they are released before their full term. The proportion of the nominal sentence actually served has marginally increased, not decreased, from 46 per cent. to 48 per cent. over the period from 1995 to 2005.
	As the hon. Gentleman knows, the arrangements for ECL exclude many categories, including those who are serious, violent and dangerous offenders. But because ECL involves such a relatively short period of prior release, it is done by assessment against set criteria and not individual risk assessments of the kind that necessarily apply to HDC and parole, where the prior release times are much longer, and in the case of either, the offences may be more serious. As I explained, there are a number of exclusions from ECL, including those who have no release address, or who have previously broken temporary release arrangements or escaped from custody.
	The logical consequence of the hon. Gentleman's argument was that no one should ever be released from prison unless we could be certain that they would not commit a further offence. The dismal truth is that quite a large number of prisoners, however long they are kept, are likely to commit a further offence. Would that it were otherwise. One of the reasons why I am so keen on working to improve the effectiveness of community sentences and also public understanding, but above all the effectiveness, is so that there is less likelihood of those offenders reoffending, but some will. I strongly advise the hon. Gentleman against going into the next election saying that once someone is admitted to prison, they are never going to be released, or that the Conservatives will abandon any idea of early release for good behaviour, or that no offender will ever commit a further offence.
	A luxury of opposition, as Conservative Members so ably demonstrate, is that they do not need to come up with the answers. The job of Government is to come up with answers. Although we understand that an effective penal policy must be based on more than the bricks and mortar of prisons, we have also recognised the need for additional places, which is why in the past 10 years we have provided additional prison places at twice the rate under the previous Administration. Sorry, but that is a fact. It took the Conservatives 18 years to produce just under 20,000 places. It has taken us 10. In other words, they added an average of 1,000 places a year, whereas we have added an average of 2,000 places a year.  [ Interruption. ] There is no dubiety about that—it is the truth.
	In addition, my right hon. Friend the previous Home Secretary announced a further building programme to deliver 8,000 new prison places by 2012. On top of that, a further 1,500 places were announced by the Minister of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr. Hanson), on 19 June. Work has started on 500 of those extra places, the first of which will come into use in January next year.
	I welcome this debate, not least because I hope that, as the hon. Gentleman said, we can agree that it is time to have a sensible national debate about sentencing and the use of prison in England and Wales. Lord Hurd of Westwell sought to tackle that when he was Home Secretary back in 1987. Would that we had heard similar balanced remarks from the hon. Gentleman, who wishes to succeed him in due course. Lord Hurd told this House of
	"the need to strike a balance between tough sentences for those who pose a threat to society and lesser sentences for those who pose no such threat. Hence the emphasis which we have placed on tough and challenging alternatives to custody".—[ Official Report, 16 July 1987; Vol. 119, c. 1296.]
	That sentiment was expressed as the Tory Administration were seeking again to address the pressure of prison numbers. They had first sought to do so in 1984 by increasing parole in order to double the overall rate of release. I was reminded of Lord Hurd's wise words when reading the detailed comments of the hon. and learned Member for Harborough, who favours a review of sentencing. He says that there are
	"far too many people in prison for them humanely and safely to be kept in prison".
	I agree with that, although he has gone on to say that prison does not work, which I question. Yet his bosses take a completely different view. "Build more prisons," they say, without any details of how to pay for them.
	Let me come on to some of the key issues that the hon. Gentleman must face if he is going to be serious about having a prison policy. He told the  Littlehampton Gazette—of which, I hope that he tells its editor, I have become an assiduous reader—that
	"offenders should serve their sentence in full—period."
	 [ Interruption. ] He says yes. Fine—if that is the policy of the Conservative party, I invite him to consider its effect. The effect of prisoners serving their sentence—that is, their nominal sentence—in full, period, would be to add 60,000 places to the prison population over a period of at least 10 years, on top of the other projections. If he questions that figure, I am happy to make available independent statisticians in my Department or the Office for National Statistics, or he can go to the Library if he prefers. He has committed himself to 60,000 extra places, and the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) has said something similar:
	"It's ridiculous...The first step would be to scrap Tony Blair's parole reforms, which now allow 30,000 criminals a year to be freed on licence before they've even completed half their sentence."
	An extra 60,000 prison places would cost £6.6 billion to build and £2.2 billion a year to run.

Jack Straw: I do not accept that. We have provided additional resources to the probation service of, I think, £300,000, and we will continue to do so. Of course I regret any reoffending by any prisoner. However, we are talking about releasing people two and a half weeks early: anybody would think that we were talking about murderers sentenced for a minimum tariff of 20 years being let out after a year. The hon. and learned Gentleman must face the fact that there is always a risk when prisoners are released. We have increased the amount of resources to the probation service by 70 per cent.-plus in real terms, above what the previous Conservative Administration provided, because I recognised as Home Secretary, as did my successors, the need to have end-to-end management of sentences. We also extended the period of licence to the end of the sentence, not the three-quarters point. He is absolutely right—we are talking about short-sentence prisoners who would be let out in any event, and always in no more than two and a half weeks' time.
	The oddest thing of all is the complaint that we should not give these prisoners any money, which has been part of the criticism levelled at us by the Conservatives. They are not eligible for benefit, but we are told, time and again, that we should release them on to the streets without any money at all—without the £200. That would be facile in the extreme, as well as being inhumane.

Jack Straw: If the hon. Gentleman wants to know what it is about, I suggest that he examines the terms of reference of the Carter review, which has already been established. I was going to deal with this at the end of my speech, but I will do it now. As part of my Sunday reading, I read  The Sunday Telegraph, which is usually extremely informative on further splits in the Conservative party and other difficulties that the Conservatives have faced, including in Ealing, Southall and Sedgefield. I do not wish to intrude on private grief, but the public interest requires it. The right hon. Member for Witney—currently Rwanda—said that he had asked the hon. Gentleman to establish a review of prison policy. I think that it has only just been established, and I am not asking him what the results are. I was astonished that the Leader of the Opposition was saying that they were going to have a review, and thought that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister would follow it. He has only just caught up. We spend millions of pounds on researchers in Conservative central office—we have trebled the amount of money that they receive—but they are still doing poor work. If they had Googled "prisons review", they could have found out that on 10 May my predecessor announced that Lord Carter of Coles was to conduct a review about the balance between the supply of and demand for prison places, which will of course include the practice of indeterminate sentences. Moreover, the Constitutional Affairs Committee, which is shortly to be renamed the Justice Committee, is conducting a review of sentences and other matters, on which I will be giving evidence later this evening.
	We have to have a rational, sensible debate about the totality of the prison estate and how we use other methods. I understand that it is very difficult because, on one level, for all of our constituents, the demand is that where a serious offence is committed, so-and-so should be jailed. I understand that—we have all faced it—and I do not apologise for the fact that I presided over an increase of 20,000 prison places, because I thought that it was necessary.

Jack Straw: There is a real problem with young, persistent serious offenders, many of whom have drifted into criminal behaviour at a very early age. They often come from chaotic, dysfunctional families or—even worse from their point of view—are looked-after children, typically in local authority care. There are no easy answers that allow us to break this cycle. Some of those young people have to be locked up for the protection of the public, and sometimes for their own protection, to give them an opportunity to be educated. We have expanded the custodial estate for such prisoners.
	One of the reasons why my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister established the Department for Children, Schools and Families, and a joint responsibility in respect of the Youth Justice Board for the Secretary of State in that Department and myself, which I greatly welcome, was to look more widely at how we divert some of those young people from offending before they get to that point, and how we might support them better if and when they do offend.
	I know that time is pressing, so I want to finish by saying this. We must have a sensible debate, and I welcome the contribution that some Opposition Members have made. Conservative Front Benchers have to make up their mind about this matter. We could, if we wanted to, carry on increasing the population, not just to the levels we propose—it will have to be increased—but to the levels to which it has been increased in United States. The US now has 2 million people in prison. Its incarceration rate is five times that of the UK, and we have one of the highest incarceration rates in Europe. Such an increase would mean not 80,000 prisoners but 400,000, and not 140 prisons, but 700. The public may want that. I do not think that they do—I think that they want to go a different way—and if they do not, all of us have to participate in this debate about the sensible level of risk and the sensible balance between putting people in prison and doing our best to take them out of crime outside prison.

David Heath: I welcome the opportunity to debate this issue. I agree that there is a need for a national conversation about it, and I hope that it is slightly better informed and more valuable than is sometimes the case. The motion is extremely timely because there is a crisis in our prison system. It is one that has developed not in the past few weeks, but in the past few years. Many of us recall the situation during the previous Conservative Administration. I remember, as a chairman of a police authority, having to find a large number of police cells to help out with long-term prisoners, and those cells were no longer available for their primary purpose. That was a very difficult circumstance.
	I tend to agree that the position during the past few weeks with regard to early release, and the system's lack of ability to cope with the risk assessment of some of those released, has been shambolic, and we should say so. The Government have not shown themselves in the best light through their inability to perform their basic duties appropriately.
	What I cannot agree with or accept is the simplistic demand for more and more prison capacity. It does not make sense. It is not a logical response to the situation in the country. When I see Conservative Members blithely saying that they would like to double the prison population, and spend an extra £3.4 billion on building prisons—an extra penny on income tax—

David Heath: Our plan was a penny on income tax to go towards education, but the hon. Gentleman's party wants a penny on income tax to build more prisons, and support a policy of failure. Is that the right way? It does not seem appropriate to me at all. The Leader of the Opposition, seems to be all over the place on the issue, too. Sometimes he wants to hug a hoodie, and other times, he wants—as he told the  Evening Standard—to convict and lock up more and more criminals. I presume it depends on whether one catches him on a flip or a flop. The former is a flip, and the latter a flop.
	The Government have a problem with their attitude, and they know it perfectly well. It was encapsulated by the response from the Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr. Hanson) at Justice questions the other day. He recognised the fact that we cannot simply carry on increasing the prison population, but went on to say:
	"I want to see the figure reduced, but we are building more prison places because, inexorably, there will be people who need to be in prison."—[ Official Report, 18 July 2007; Vol. 463, c. 266.]
	He sees the increase in the number of people in prison as inexorable, while at the same time, he wants a reduction. I do not think that it is inexorable because we need to find ways of making our penal policy more effective. Let us be clear that only one aspect of prison is effective; it works in only way: protecting the public from the activities of those who are locked up.

David Heath: That is not an uncommon situation, sadly. Those who work in the prison education service would give a despondent and discouraging view of what they can now provide and of what they could provide, given appropriate support.
	The fourth element in reducing the prison population is doing something much more effective with what are often disparagingly called community sentences—I prefer to call them public service sentences. We have to make them much more appropriate to the crimes that are committed and much more related to the communities in which they are committed.
	That point was made by the hon. Member for Rochford and Southend, East (James Duddridge) during his ten-minute Bill speech, which immediately preceded this debate. His Bill hit the nail on the head. He talked about the effect of minor vandalism and graffiti, and about how restorative justice procedures could make people not only put right the damage that they have done within the community, but be seen to be making amends. Also, all the evidence supports the view that they would be far less likely to offend as a result of that than they would be after a short prison sentence. All the evidence shows that sentences of less than three months have very little deterrent effect—in fact, quite the reverse. They tend to encourage a sense of criminality and an identification with criminality among those who might otherwise be diverted from more serious offences. That is something on which we need to concentrate.
	My final point about reducing the numbers in the estate is about the position of children. We have 2,200 people under 18 in prison. That is not the right place for children. I accept that there are young offenders who make the lives of people in communities a misery. We need to do something effective to stop them from reoffending and, particularly if they are persistent offenders of a certain type, to remove them from the community, so that they can no longer inflict damage upon it. However, I do not think that prison is the right way of doing that. We have to have alternative and more appropriate ways of detaining young people.
	I return to restorative justice processes, which are shown to be particularly effective with young people. We have a community justice panel in Chard in Somerset, where there is a 5 per cent. reoffending rate. Let us compare that with the rates for prison and consider which has the most effective outcome.

George Howarth: I am grateful for that helpful advice, Mr. Deputy Speaker, and as you know, I always try to follow the advice from the Chair. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath). He presented his argument in a characteristically thoughtful and good-natured way, but to my mounting horror I found that I agreed with one of his points. I am beginning to assess whether to think through my arguments further.
	My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Justice—or, as he prefers to be known, Lord High Chancellor—delivered a spirited rendition of the great achievements of the past 10 years. Since he has already done that I will take them as read and not repeat them. Despite all the achievements that he referred to, however, crime, antisocial behaviour and the fear of crime still have a terrible effect on many of our communities, and disproportionately so on the most vulnerable.
	We need to place more emphasis on two or three key areas. We need to consider increasing the number of offences that are brought to justice—in other words, to do something about the offences that are committed, but whose perpetrators never end up inside a courtroom, for one reason or another. We need to look at reducing offending, as several hon. Members have already said, and we need to continue the search for better ways of tackling antisocial behaviour.
	Just stating those aims does not result in any change. They cover difficult and challenging areas, but I welcome the fact that the Government are rightly addressing them; my right hon. Friend emphasised all three of them in his speech, albeit in perhaps slightly different terms. If we are to make real progress, it is essential that we focus our interventions on what has been shown to be most effective—this is where I agree with the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome. Basically, that means using interventions that have a strong evidence base. It also means talking to offenders, who have direct experience of the criminal justice system.
	For a period, I served under my right hon. Friend—perhaps in an undistinguished way—as a junior Minister in the Home Office. I learnt a great deal from talking to young people, mostly men, in young offender institutions. Surprisingly perhaps, they are quite honest. They will talk about things—what they have been involved in, their family background and so on—that they would not be so frank about in other walks of life. There is a great deal to be learnt from that. We can also learn a great deal from their experience. One of the conclusions that I reached was that they had spent far too long in an offending career before anyone even bothered to bring them into a courtroom. We should also be open to adapting the techniques pioneered in other countries to the circumstances that we find in Britain, and to measuring the effectiveness of such experiments against existing practice.
	Much attention has been paid to offenders once they get into the criminal justice system—that is what today's debate is about—and many commentators have observed that the system struggles because it is attempting to address wider social problems that are beyond the remit of the prison service. This means that we need to make earlier interventions to address problematic behaviour before it reaches the criminal justice system. Where such interventions work, there are obvious benefits. They reduce the incidence of antisocial behaviour, and there is less pressure on custodial sentences. A recent report from the King's college centre for crime and justice studies stated that
	"a growing number of studies show that extended time spent in the company of other problematic young people has a negative influence on an individual's development and their likelihood of staying out of trouble".
	True though that might be, it is important not to loose sight of the fact that custodial sentences are still a useful and necessary option. At the very least, those in custody are not at liberty to continue offending.
	So what early interventions should we explore? We know that many young offenders have more unstable lives, and that as they get beyond school age they are more likely to be unemployed and benefit dependent in one way or another. We should consider giving greater access to facilities that help to tackle this as early as possible. Sure Start schemes, for example, start at the very beginning of childhood to give people a better start in life. In Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands, there are so-called large schools, in which a range of services for young people and their carers are available. We need to look more closely at such schemes and initiatives.
	There are also examples of successful initiatives that introduce more structure into previously chaotic lives. One good example is the advanced skills academy in Liverpool, a military-style project run by ex-military personnel. The academy is designed for young people who are either excluded from school or unlikely to benefit from a conventional education. It offers a structured day and includes activities such as army drill and fitness sessions. It is a relatively new project, and having visited it, I believe that it is a good way to give disaffected young people pride in themselves and to put some structure into their lives.
	On a national scale, Skill Force, which was established by the MOD, does a similar job. The Skill Force project that operates in All Saints school in my constituency offers young people positive role models from a military background. The young people find it easy to trust and respect those role models, and that can mean a great deal to otherwise alienated young people. I am working with Lieutenant-Colonel Tony Hollingsworth of the Duke of Lancaster's Regiment and the local education authority in Knowsley to adapt these military approaches as part of the package available for 14 to 19-year-olds. I should add that, if my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Justice has a spare £50,000 in his budget, this project would be able to make good use of it. I hope to have an opportunity to talk to him about that.

George Howarth: I am grateful to my right hon. Friend.
	A number of the available interventions offer great benefits. There are many different people with a lot of complex needs, and if we can tailor a range of options and interventions to suit all those different needs, we will have a greater chance of success. As I mentioned earlier, it is essential that we ascertain how effective these interventions are, regardless of the point at which they take place in an offender's career. We need to be able to measure their effectiveness, and to conduct studies of how one intervention compares with another. I believe that there is a lot to be gained from that kind of study.
	Time prevents me from saying much more on this subject, but I believe that the reason why we have a problem with the number of people in prison today, the number of places available and the costs involved is that we do not pay enough attention at an early stage to how patterns of offending can be prevented before they even start. The kind of interventions that I have described offer some ways forward, but there are many other ideas that are worthy of consideration. I hope that my right hon. Friend will listen hard to the large number of people who have ideas on this subject.

David Davies: I thank the right hon. Gentleman.
	The present system of sentencing is an absolute shambles. About the only subject on which I agreed with the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) was the need for transparency in sentencing. There has been talk today of letting prisoners out of jail 18 days early, but the reality is that virtually all prisoners are let out early, usually months or even years before the sentence that they have been given by a judge has been completed. Someone sentenced to one year in prison is often out on a tag after only three months. A two-year sentence will often mean just seven and a half months in prison, and a four-year sentence, which is usually handed out for serious crimes such as armed robbery or even rape, will often result in the offender spending only one year and seven and a half months or so in prison.
	As for life sentences, the term is a joke. Some research that I did last year showed that, as of April 2006, more than 50 people who had been sentenced to life imprisonment since 2000 had already been let out, including a rapist who had been let out after just under a year. Our sentencing structure is a complete and utter disgrace. It is nothing more than a confidence trick designed to make the public think that they are a whole lot safer than they are, and that sentences are a lot longer than they are.
	I listened with some interest to the Lord Chancellor earlier. It appeared that he and my colleagues on the Front Bench accept the importance of prison and the need to ensure that people spend longer in prison than is currently the case. The same cannot be said for the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome, however, who trotted out all the usual arguments put forward by the anti-prison lobby for allowing offenders to run amok on the streets.
	The hon. Gentleman talked about the costs involved. If I cannot say anything else in my allotted time today, I want to get this across: prison is actually very cheap indeed. He mentioned a figure of about £36,000 per annum for keeping someone in prison. The Government say that it is about £32,000 a year. In actual fact, we are not talking about category A prisoners here. Everyone—even the Liberal Democrats—accepts that category A prisoners need to be in prison, and they are the most expensive to house. What we are talking about is category B, C and D prisoners, and the actual cost of keeping those in prison is well under £30,000 a year; indeed, I believe it is about £25,000. From that gross figure to the taxpayer, however, one has to remember that three quarters of people entering a prison estate are on various forms of benefits when they do so. In order to get the true net cost to the taxpayer, we have to deduct from that £25,000 the money that they would have been receiving on benefit outside prison. That brings the net cost to the taxpayer to well under £20,000 a year.
	We then need to take into account the cost of leaving those people outside prison. The Carter report, to which the Lord Chancellor referred, makes it clear—on page 15, I believe—that most crime in this country is carried out by 100,000 people, of whom only 15,000 are in prison at any given time. It also makes it clear that if we doubled the current prison population from around 80,000 to 160,000, which I think would be the optimum amount, crime in this country would halve. The costs of crime were estimated by the Home Office in 2000 at £60 billion a year, and I have subsequently seen estimates of up to £90 billion a year. That is the total cost to society of the crimes committed in a year.
	If we doubled the prison population and spent not £3 billion but £6 billion to house 160,000 people, taking out the 85,000 recidivist offenders, we would actually make a net saving according to the Government's own figures—yes, on the Government's own figures— [Interruption.] If the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, South (Mr. Flello) does not agree with what is in the Carter report, I will give way to him. As I was saying, the Government's own figures suggest that we could make a saving of tens of billions of pounds a year by putting persistent offenders in prison.
	Of course, when confronted with the cost argument, all these anti-prison people such as the Liberal Democrats suddenly want to change the subject and they start talking about the rehabilitation rates, as did the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome. It is certainly true that about 60 per cent. of people coming out after a short prison sentence will reoffend, but what the hon. Gentleman does not know, or does not want to know, is that people serving longer prison sentences are much less likely to reoffend. For those serving one to four years, the reoffending rate is 50 per cent.; for those serving four to 10 years, the reoffending rate within two years is 33 per cent.—and that does not include lifers.
	What that demonstrates is that, as the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome said, there is no point in putting people in prison for a short time, but there is every reason to put people in for a longer time. Many people entering the prison estate, by the time they have been assessed and then put there, face only a few months of incarceration, so prison officers make life as comfortable as they can for them and leave them to it. What we should be doing is keeping hold of people for at least one to two years and ensuring that they have proper access to the vocational qualifications and the drug-related and anger management courses that they need.
	There are two prisons in my constituency. One is a high-security sex offenders prison and the other is an open prison. By the way, a propos of nothing, it is the open prisons that cause the problems, because those are the ones that people walk out of. The sex offenders prison, despite the people who are in there, runs very good vocational courses. It can do that because the prisoners are in there for long enough. That is what we should be offering young offenders and prisoners in the B and C estates. We often cannot do that, because they are simply not in prison for long enough.
	On of the greatest problems with prison, apart from the fact that people are completely biased against it, is the fact that we do not do enough to support the prison officers who work in the prison estates. Those who come to see me often complain that although they have access to items such as the retractable baton and gas in adult prisons, they do not have access to them in some young offenders prisons.
	The hon. Member for Somerton and Frome referred earlier to young offenders as "children"—an emotive word. Let me tell him that in my work as an occasional special constable, the first person I arrested was a 16-year-old carrying two handguns—and he had a third one back at his house. In my view, that sort of person is a very serious offender, and I hope he was locked up for it—although I never quite found out what happened. According to the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome, that offender is an innocent little child who should be left to his own devices. The reality is that we will never tackle crime in this country unless we recognise the importance of putting a certain number of people in prison and keeping them there for long enough to change their behaviour.
	The first thing we should do is to stop all forms of early release. That applies to the 18-day scheme in place at the moment—although frankly, it is small beer in comparison with what else is going on—or any other schemes, including tagging and automatic early release. All those need to stop, so that the public can be assured that when a judge hands out a sentence, it will be served in full.
	Next, we should ensure that all those who go to prison are kept there long enough to get some form of vocational qualification, and to get off the drugs and alcohol that have so often brought them there in the first place. We need to raise the status of prison officers and stop thinking about them in terms of the documentaries and so-called "docu-films" such as "Scum", which presented the work of prison officers wrongly. The vast majority of prison officers, like the vast majority of police officers, nurses, doctors and other public servants, do an excellent job to very high standards.
	If we did all that, we might just have a chance. Unfortunately, we are likely to carry on in the same way. We might get the prison population up to about 90,000, but the length of sentences will not be long enough to deter people from a life of crime, and we will continue to listen to the Howard League for Penal Reform, the Prison Reform Trust—and, unfortunately, the Liberal Democrats, who do not seem to recognise that there are some people who are simply not fit to walk the streets of this country.

Humfrey Malins: I begin by declaring an interest as a Crown court recorder and a district judge, who has to deal with some of these problems daily. The motion refers to
	"the proper treatment and rehabilitation of offenders"
	and that is the main aspect on which I want to concentrate briefly this evening. I wish to focus particularly on education, sport and drug rehabilitation for younger offenders under 21.
	I would like to start with two anecdotes. First, about eight or 10 years ago, I talked to a young offender at a Cheltenham remand institution and I asked him what he was doing in there. He told me that he was there because he had been disqualified from driving for the third time and was given a three-month sentence. I asked him about his criminal record, but there was nothing else on it. I then asked him why he got disqualified and he told me that he was driving without a licence and without insurance and they kept catching him. I asked whether he had ever had an accident and he said, "No, of course not. I am a great driver and I have never had an accident". I asked him why on earth he could not get a licence, for goodness' sake—"Because I cannot pass the theory test because I cannot read and write. That is it". That was a perfectly good young man, yet he was given a three-month sentence.
	Let us move now to the magistrates court, where I sit as a district judge, and reflect on another young man. Today he stands in the dock; yesterday he walked into a supermarket and walked out, quite unashamedly with a whole lot of razor blades, which he was going to sell to make the money to get his drugs. There he is in the dock; he looks about 60; he is shaking and scratching his arm; he can barely hold his head up. I ask him to confirm his age—20. There is another ruined life. He began life in a dysfunctional family on a bad council estate; he was on solvents at 11, cannabis at 12; he gained no qualifications, no job, nothing. He got into serious drugs and there he goes.
	It is worth talking a little about what we can do for our young offenders when they are in custody. Can we make a better fist of it? We would all agree that education is very important indeed. We know what young men are like; we were all young men. I look around the Chamber, and every colleague here this evening was once a young man—

Nick Hurd: I am conscious of the fact that the Front Benchers wish to speak. I wish to add one small point to the debate and to take up the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert). He pointed out that 50 per cent. of crime comes from reoffending. The evidence shows clearly that some basic things need to be provided to support people to turn away from that path. One is some accommodation to go to; another is some family support to tap into and the third is a job and some prospect of meaningful employment.
	I recommend to the Minister that he takes some time to look at an initiative in my constituency introduced by Blue Sky. That initiative was set up by Mick May in partnership with Groundwork locally and it is supported by Hillingdon council. It is the only company in the country that insists on someone having a criminal record before entering its employment. It employs ex-cons basically to clean up and to green Hillingdon and to look after the parks. They are highly visible, making a contribution to the community. If the Minister were to talk to the people on that scheme, he would recognise how crucial to their lives those six months at Blue Sky are. One young man travels two hours a day to take part because he sees it as his lifeline at that crucial moment after he exited prison.
	Innovative voluntary projects such as that are making a huge difference, but the Government and the Prison Service, and the culture of "Not invented here" seem to be so resistant. We have to open our minds.

Edward Garnier: I thank my hon. Friends and other right hon. and hon. Members for their contributions to the debate. I think that the Secretary of State would agree that that was probably not the best of his speeches, but I do not want to abuse him too much in his absence. He has apologised for the fact that he cannot be here for the winding-up speeches because he has to give evidence to the Select Committee that is chaired by the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith).
	Like my hon. Friend the Member for Woking (Mr. Malins), I want to confess to being a Crown court recorder and to having to deal with the sort of feeble people who appear before the courts week in, week out—feeble intellectually, socially and in terms of mental and physical health—on that great conveyor belt of people that comes before district judges, recorders and pretty well every other member of the judiciary who have to deal with criminal defendants in that jurisdiction. What both my hon. Friend and my hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip-Northwood (Mr. Hurd), who spoke cogently, if briefly, have said is key. We will never reduce reoffending until we get a better product, if I can use that hideous expression, coming out of our custodial establishments, be they young offender institutions, or adult prisons, and until we get people who are off drugs, can read, can write, are physically healthy and motivated, so that they can lead sensible and constructive lives.
	The Conservative party's review of this area of debate will be led by my hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert). One of the many things that it will think hard about is incarceration because that is an important and central part of any criminal justice policy. I hope that that pleases my hon. Friend the Member for Monmouth (David T.C. Davies). It will also ensure that we do not simply incarcerate, but do something with the people whom we incarcerate when they are in prisons, young offender institutions or secure training units, so that when they come out—most people who are sent into custody are released at some stage; only about 1 or 2 per cent. of those who are sent into custody never come out again—they can go to the jobcentre, read what is on offer and get a job, and they can stagger out into the streets healthy rather than looking for the next fix.
	At the moment, other than those people who are released on ECL, as it is called nowadays, I think that most prisoners get demob money of about £45 to £50. Far too many of them go straight to the nearest railway cutting and buy the next fix, and around they go again. It will not do. It is a waste of everyone's money. It is not an absence of Conservative thinking to say, "Let us think rather more carefully about what we do in prison with prisoners, just as we want to think about what we do outside prison to prevent offending and reoffending."

Edward Garnier: Yes. The Secretary of State thought it amusing to chide me for having admitted to Mary Ann Sieghart in an article that she wrote in  The Times nearly 18 months ago, when I was appointed by the Leader of the Opposition to shadow the prisons portfolio, that I was on a voyage of discovery. The one thing about being on a voyage of discovery is that one looks, learns and sees and one gains from the experience of looking and learning. Rather than arrogantly saying that we know everything, those of us on a voyage of discovery allow ourselves to be influenced by the people we have met and by what we have seen on that voyage. Part of that voyage of discovery has taken me to 25 custodial institutions, adult prisons and young offender institutions in England and Wales. That is probably rather more—I am subject to correction—than the present Lord Chancellor visited when he was Home Secretary and started the fiasco that we are now having to sort out. It is true that the Minister has already been to one or two prisons.  [Interruption.] He says that he has been to eight in eight weeks; that is very good, but he ought to go to many more to see the evidence of the failure of his Government's policies, and they should then come up with some better ones.
	I entirely agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Monmouth that we tend to forget about the prison officers, who have to work and live in very difficult circumstances day in and day out. Let me give an example: 18 months ago a wing of Norwich prison had to be decanted because inmates were living in their own sewage and officers were having to work in it. That is a disgusting state of affairs, and it was presided over by this Government thanks to their overcrowding policy. Because of overcrowding and the Government's incompetent management of our prison system, that disgusting wing has had to be refilled with prisoners and officers. I have some sympathy for the prisoners, who have been sent to prison because of their misdemeanours, but I have a huge amount of sympathy for the prison officers working in both private and public prisons who have to endure such unattractive circumstances in their working lives.
	The right hon. Member for Knowsley, North and Sefton, East (Mr. Howarth) was right to stress the importance of early intervention. Many of the problems we face, such as the current overcrowding in our prison estate, arise because people are allowed to slip through the net at far too young an age. That might have happened because of family breakdown, drugs or drink; but whatever the cause is, the Government have failed to get a grip on it, and I encourage them to follow the right hon. Gentleman's advice on intervention.
	The hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) and my hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Patrick Cormack) mentioned restorative justice. It is hugely valuable, but only in a limited number of cases; it works well only where there is the right defendant and the right victim and both of them agree that it is the right process to go through. If it does not work well, it goes badly wrong, but I have sometimes seen it work extremely well—in Wandsworth and in Cardiff, for instance—and it is of huge value to the criminal justice system.
	Sadly, I have little time in which to deliver what should be a half-hour speech, but I shall endeavour to persuade the Government that our motion is worthy of support. On 12 July, the new Secretary of State for Justice unburdened himself to the Murdoch press by calling for a national debate on the prison overcrowding crisis. He said that he wanted to send fewer people to prison. Some of us will remember the Secretary of State as the last Home Secretary but three and the man who was in charge of prisons and criminal justice policy from 1997 to 2001—half the period that this Government have been in office—but anyone would think from what he said that he considers the mess that he and his colleagues have created to be a totally surprising state of affairs.
	The Government's policy then and now is to be seen as being tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime. In order to demonstrate that, they have created 3,000 additional criminal offences, introduced 65 criminal justice statutes and decreed that more people should be sent to prison, and for longer. However, they have failed to understand that that will result in the prisons filling up. If they had planned sensibly, they would have ensured that there was sufficient capacity in the prisons to accommodate the additional people being sent there as a result of public policy.
	Overcrowded prisons are the rock on which this Government's criminal justice policy has foundered. If we have overcrowded prisons, we can achieve nothing with prisoners. If we can achieve nothing with prisoners because the prison estate is overcrowded, we will not reduce reoffending but we will increase the danger to the public. My hon. Friend the Member for Monmouth wants to reduce reoffending to protect the public—our electors and taxpayers. The Government must get their head around the simple equation that overcrowding equals sclerosis and ineffective rehabilitation of offenders. This is not about being soft; it is about being competent—it is about using money wisely, and ensuring that the citizens of our country can, as my hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs said, walk out of their houses or come home from their jobs without being hit on the head by some demented drug addict who wants their purse or wallet.
	As has been said in the debate, a huge proportion of those who commit crimes are under the influence of drugs. In the main, it is addicts who commit crimes, not criminals who become drug addicts. What my hon. Friend the Member for Woking said on this matter was right: until the Government deal with that fact, they will be putting the cart before the horse.
	The Government make a further mistake. They assume that when they say that they have built 20,000 new prison places since 1997, the public believe that it is true. That is not true. They have increased the number of prisoners by more than 20,000, and they have sought to reduce that in a panic-driven way through the ECL scheme, which will over the course of the next year lead to an increase of 25,000 in the number of people being pushed out of prison early and produce a net reduction in the prison population of only 1,250.
	Mary Riddell noted this weekend in  The Observer that despite ECL, the prison population would increase by 500 a week. If that is competent management of our prison system, I am a banana—and I am not talking about Robert Peel. The Government have not produced 20,000 additional spaces, as they claim. As my hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs said, they have merely doubled-up single cells, trebled-up double cells and created a continuing and growing mess. It is a mess of their own making, and I wish I had longer to speak on it. It is not only a national disgrace, but criminally reckless.

David Hanson: I thank Members for the tone in which they have conducted the debate.
	The hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Mr. Garnier) has just admitted that he might be a banana. I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Wansdyke (Dan Norris) will back me up in that there are certainly some banana splits on the Opposition Benches today as there is a difference in policy approach between the hon. and learned Gentleman and the hon. Member for Woking (Mr. Malins) and other Opposition Members who have made different points.
	I do not duck the fact that there are serious issues that need to be tackled in respect of the prison population, or that we face challenges in preventing reoffending and ensuring that our citizens get what they deserve: a crime-free society in which they can live safely in their homes and communities. I could go on about the fact that there is 35 per cent. less crime in our society now than there was when the Conservative party was in office, but that would not be a constructive way to approach the debate.
	There is common ground on some of the challenges we face. The hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath), the hon. and learned Gentleman and the hon. Member for Woking agree that we need to slow the growth in the prison population, and that is clearly true. There are 79,500 people in prison, and according to Government forecasts—which are due to be revised in October—that figure might rise to between 102,000 and 104,000 by 2012. We have planned some 9,500 new prison places—real ones—and for new prisons, extensions to prisons and units to be built over the next five years, but it is clear that a gap remains between the number of new places and the forecasted rise in the prison population. We have two options. As the hon. Member for Monmouth (David T.C. Davies) said, we can raise even further the number of prison places. The right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (David Davis) would happily support that, and I suspect that the hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) would also support that. However, I do not think that the hon. and learned Gentleman or the hon. Member for Woking would support that principle.
	We need to look at how we manage prison population issues for the future. We are clear that we need to build extra prison places to meet present need, but we also need—as I have said to the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome in correspondence and discussions on the matter—to try to reduce the growth in the prison population.
	There is further common ground on the need for early intervention. My right hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley, North and Sefton, East (Mr. Howarth) made a thoughtful speech on that point, as did the hon. Member for Woking. We need to reduce reoffending and make prisons a place where learned skills and employability—not only in prison, but on the outside—become a reality. The hon. Member for Ruislip-Northwood (Mr. Hurd) touched on that issue and I concur with the points that he made.
	Whatever we do, we need to ensure that we reduce crime, and that is also common ground. Every drop in crime means fewer of my constituents—and every other hon. Member's constituents—suffering the burden of crime. We need to tackle the issue of clarity in sentencing and we need to consider the impact of sentencing policy on the prison population.
	It has not been mentioned today, but we need to consider penal policy as it affects women. I will shortly consider the report by Baroness Corston, and I will give a response to it in the autumn. I will consider how we can reduce the number of women in prison, because a prison sentence affects not only the person imprisoned, but the families, the community and the people with whom they live, work and share lives, and it is clear that there are too many women in prison at present.
	We are agreed that we need to reduce reoffending, protect the public and plan for the future. If I may make a minor political point, it has been evident today that there is a difference of approach between the hon. Member for Monmouth, who, I remind the House, urged that 160,000 people should be put in prison, at a cost that even the hon. Member for Tatton (Mr. Osborne) would not—

David Hanson: I do not know which Carter report the hon. Gentleman is reading, but the Carter report to which I refer has not yet been written or published by Lord Carter. We have given him terms of reference, which he is considering, but the report will be brought back to the House and Ministers in the autumn.
	The Government have a clear strategy to build more prison places, to prevent reoffending, to make community sentences a reality, and to consider how we tackle the problems of drugs, housing and employability both outside and inside prison. However, with due respect to Conservative Members, there appears to be a clear split between those, like the hon. and learned Gentleman, who wish to see a focus on drug treatment, employability and the causes of crime, including improvements in literacy and housing provision, and those such as the hon. Gentleman, who said today that he wants to double the prison population, and the right hon. Gentleman, who wants to see more prisons built, whatever it takes. But the hon. Member for Tatton is not willing to commit resources even to the 9,500 places that I have promised.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: We now come to the next motion, which is on policy on global poverty. I must advise the House that Mr. Speaker has selected the amendment that stands in the name of the Prime Minister. I must also advise the House that there will be a 10-minute limit on all Back-Bench speeches in the debate.

Oliver Letwin: I beg to move,
	That this House reaffirms the cross-party commitment to increase the aid budget to 0.7 per cent. of gross national income by 2013; recognises the ability of effectively organised aid to contribute to sustainable economic development in low income countries; acknowledges the need to avoid imposing over-prescriptive conditions on aid; supports the wider use of tracking surveys and independent accounting as well as increased independent scrutiny of the United Kingdom's aid budget to make the ultimate destination of aid payments more transparent; welcomes the suggestion that donors should work together in partnership trusts to ensure coordination of bilateral aid budgets in each recipient country; and urges the Government to work towards the unilateral removal by the EU of trade barriers against low income countries.
	This topic is, by common consent, probably the most important one that the world currently faces. Probably the worst feature of our world is that so many people live in dire poverty. That is a matter of consensus among not just ourselves and Government Members, but Liberal Members and, indeed, I am glad to say, the whole political establishment in Britain, but I wonder whether it is as keenly felt by all our fellow citizens as it might be.
	I certainly admit that, over a number of years, the Conservative party, although it shared the consensus on spending, for example, and has done for many years in this field, did not pay the subject the attention it was due. One of the very first things that happened when my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) became the leader of the party is that we asked my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley), who is in his place, to chair a policy review group to look into how we might propose sensible, robust and effective policies to improve Britain's performance in this area.

Oliver Letwin: I hope that, as we proceed with what I, at least, intend to be a serious debate on the most pressing problem of the world, we will not descend to partisan repartee. In fact, over the years, it will be seen that the commitment of my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney to this subject and his willingness to continue with his engagement, notwithstanding the considerable political pressure to the contrary, is a sign of the same kind of commitment that is displayed by the fact that the group chaired by my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden has now produced what is, by common consent of those who are expert in the field, a very serious piece of work. Today we met a large number of representatives of the non-governmental organisations, who had many good and useful things to say in support of much of what is in the report. I hope that the debate will be the beginning of a prolonged national discussion of the propositions in the report. We certainly intend that discussion to inform our policy as it emerges.
	The report does much more than merely commit to a seriousness in relation to the relief of global poverty. It refocuses the discussion of the relief of global poverty. In particular, it offers a clear view of what the route out of global poverty is and has to be. In a way, what it says on that ought to have been obvious, but, over the past 20 or 30 years—this is not a partisan point; it is a point about the trend of British government over many years—it has not been followed up as if it were obvious. The report says that the way out of poverty is economic development and growth. It points out that our policies as a country have been, to a degree, deficient, in that we have failed to do as much as we could have done for growth in low-income countries.
	In particular, the report points to two parts of our policy that have been, to a degree, deficient: first, our policy on trade, and secondly, our policy on aid. The report makes a bold proposition about trade, which it describes under the heading of a "real trade campaign". It proposes that Britain and our partners in the European Union should join together and seek to achieve a unilateral disarmament in our barriers against trade from low-income countries. I stress the word "unilateral". The report does not propose that we should merely demand a reciprocal reduction in barriers on the part of low-income countries. On the contrary, it proposes that we should tear down the barriers and offer what is built on the everything-but-arms basis. But, more than that, it involves a significant change in the rules of origin. It proposes that that should be offered to low-income countries on a unilateral basis, from the European Union. That is a major potential step forward in the thinking about how we can open ourselves up to trade which may benefit us, but, much more importantly, offers the prospect of growth and economic development in parts of the world that do not have it in sufficient quantities.
	It is of course critical that the report deals not just with unilaterally tearing down barriers against trade from low-income countries, but with the need to encourage and foster south-south trade—trade between low-income countries. It makes a number of proposals about how that too can be encouraged. Nor is it the case that the report deals merely with tearing down barriers to trade. It also makes it clear that aid itself needs to be oriented more firmly towards the promotion of trade. I will come on to that as I describe the report's propositions on aid. This is an important step forward in thinking about trade, and the ability of the UK and our partner countries to promote trade from low-income countries.
	The report is equally committed to improvements in our aid programme. I stress that the report does not suggest that our aid programme is a disaster or that the Department for International Development does nothing right. As the Secretary of State will see if he chooses to read the report at some stage, it provides a fair-minded and balanced analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of the way in which DFID has been going about its business.
	The report suggests that our aid programme could be improved significantly if various things happened. First, our aid programme could be more devoted to economic development than has recently become fashionable. The report notes that, a couple of decades ago, aid for economic development began to acquire a bad name—partly because of tied aid, which by common consent we now do not believe in, and partly because of large-scale projects that did not work out right. The Secretary of State is nodding his head, but if he thinks that it was merely one set of Governments that failed in those respects, rather than many, he is wrong. It was a common failing, both across different Administrations in the UK and across other Administrations in other countries. The report argues that, as a result of all that, aid aimed at economic development acquired an unduly bad name.
	Secondly, the report notes that not only did aid have attached to it for a considerable period the wrong conditionality of being tied to our exports, but, following that period, it had attached to it—and still has attached to it—what the report regards as an excessively prescriptive view of how the aid is to be used. The report argues for a different form of conditionality. It argues that aid can do serious things—if it is the right kind of aid, rightly delivered—for the development of agriculture and of the economy as a whole in low-income countries. It argues that microfinance institutions and demand-led funding can make a significant difference to the development of those countries.
	The report argues that the conditionality that needs to apply is transparency. It argues for the much wider use of expenditure tracking surveys, independent accounting and efforts to make sure that outcomes match inputs. The report argues that DFID and Britain would be better served if there were an independent evaluation group, reporting to a Select Committee and looking into the outcomes achieved by DFID. The report notes that the public service agreements and the objectives of DFID are wide in nature and not sufficiently related to the outcomes achieved by aid.

Oliver Letwin: I wholly agree with the right hon. Gentleman, as I think would my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr. Mitchell), the shadow Secretary of State. Building up the capacity of finance ministries is a crucial component, and the report makes that very point. That is why it favours direct budgetary support, rather than highly prescriptive aid on one side. Indeed, it goes further, arguing that support for health programmes would be better achieved by giving direct budgetary support that is then passed on to the health system as a whole than by minutely targeting specific health initiatives that turn out not to have the infrastructure and support that is needed to maintain them.
	Neither I nor the report suggest that a parallel structure that undercuts a recipient country's finance ministry be established. On the contrary: the report suggests setting up a partnership trust of donors whose board could discuss its programmes with the local finance ministry, and that that could enable the finance ministry to do better at finding ways to render transparent how the money is used. It could also enable civil society in the recipient country to invigilate the finance ministry. The idea is to create a sustainable process in that country, and not impose a parallel process from outside.

Douglas Alexander: I beg to move, To leave out from "House" to the end of the Question, and to add instead thereof:
	"acknowledges the Government's global leadership on international development; welcomes the Government's stated objective to increase the aid budget to 0.7 per cent. of gross national income by 2013; further welcomes the widespread support which this policy has secured; further acknowledges the centrality of effectively delivered aid to low income countries' sustainable economic development; welcomes the Government's untying of aid; supports the United Kingdom Government's moves to establish an independent evaluation mechanism and its increased focus on aid effectiveness, results and impact; and acknowledges that the UK Government is working at the multilateral and bilateral levels to remove the trade barriers which developing countries face and to help them take advantage of new market opportunities through the provision of aid for trade."
	Two weeks ago, the United Nations published a report showing progress towards the millennium development goals. The scale of the remaining challenge is clear: every minute, a woman dies in pregnancy or childbirth, and as we have heard, every 15 seconds a child dies because they did not have access to clean water and sanitation. Each year, malaria claims 1 million lives, tuberculosis nearly 2 million lives, and AIDS 3 million lives. It is seven years since the world pledged to "spare no effort" to free men, women and children from extreme poverty, yet only one of the eight regions of the world cited in the UN report is on track to achieve all the millennium development goals.
	However, we can—and we must—make a difference. The Department for International Development's work is rightly respected around the world. The Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development said that the United Kingdom
	"offers a powerful model for development cooperation."
	The Canadian Institute of International Affairs said that the Department is
	"generally considered to be the best"—
	development agency—
	"in the world."
	The Leader of the Opposition was perhaps rather more charitable than Opposition Front Benchers have been this evening: he was willing to make the point forcibly last year that
	"We should...be proud of the Department for International Development's achievements",
	and he described it as
	"the leading national aid agency."
	Indeed, it is estimated that the Department's work lifts 3 million people out of poverty every year. I put that evidence before the House not out of complacency or false pride, but out of determination that the Department should build on its success in the years ahead to help more of the world's poor. We must do so with an informed understanding of the challenges facing us at the start of this young century—migration, climate change, conflict, and of course disease, which we have already mentioned.
	The White Paper "Eliminating world poverty: making governance work for the poor", published just over a year ago, sets out how we will tackle global poverty in a changing world—a world in which, each year, more than 190 million people leave their shores in search of a better life; in which climate change is not a theory, but a fact of life for many struggling with floods, drought and crop failures; in which scarce resources threaten to spark new conflicts; and in which disease can spread rapidly across continents.
	Later, I will talk about the contribution that the international community can make in helping the world's poorest people to tackle those challenges, but what happens within their borders is critical to their future. That is why good governance was at the heart of the White Paper. Good governance is about building effective states that are capable of providing political stability, rules and services for their citizens, that respond to what people want, and which are accountable to them. Every society will, of course, reach good governance in its own way. Our role is to support Governments, Parliaments, civil society, the media, trade unions and all the actors who will play an important role in forging that path.
	Notwithstanding the floods at home, Rwanda has been in the news, and I applaud the Leader of the Opposition's courage in spending 24 or 48 hours in that country at a difficult time for him and his party. Let us focus on that country for a moment. The United Kingdom has provided £380 million of assistance to Rwanda over the past 10 years, and has helped to implement public service and land reforms, and to ensure improvements to health and education. The result was that Rwanda's economy grew by over 10 per cent. a year for a decade. The proportion of Rwandans living on less than a dollar a day has fallen from 70 per cent. in 1994 to 57 per cent. last year.
	Even where governance standards are at their lowest, as in Zimbabwe, we will not abandon the poorest people; that would doubly punish the people in those afflicted countries. As the Government announced only last week, the Department has committed £50 million to providing seeds, fertilizers, livestock and access to HIV/AIDS care, through tried and tested partners, so that we can assist 2 million of the most vulnerable Zimbabweans.
	As well as safeguarding our aid, we must use it to fight the causes of corruption. The extractive industries transparency initiative brings together global business, Governments and non-governmental organisations to show how much money Governments receive from oil, gas and mining revenues. The Nigerian Government estimate that in one year alone that new transparency index saved $1 billion that would otherwise have been lost through corruption. That is money that can and should be spent on basic services, such as health and education services, clean drinking water and sanitation, and a safety net that people can rely on when times are hard. The White Paper committed us to increasing our spending on those public services, so that it becomes at least half of our bilateral aid budget.
	We will make more long-term commitments to help developing countries plan for not one or two years, but for a decade—commitments such as the one that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister made in Mozambique last year, when he pledged that the United Kingdom would spend £8.5 billion over 10 years to get every child into school. That will mean that countries that certainly need support can build a school and know that the money will be there to maintain it, and can train teachers, knowing that they can afford to pay a salary at the end of the training.
	There has already been much discussion on the Floor of the House on growth and trade this evening, so let me turn to those issues.

Douglas Alexander: Of course I am happy to confirm that water and sanitation are continuing sources of concern to us, and I will certainly make sure that I write to the hon. Gentleman after this evening's debate about the agenda for the G8 in the years to come.
	The hon. Gentleman's observation on partnership and working collectively in the G8 brings to mind a concern regarding trade policy that I would like raise with his Front-Bench team. I applaud the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) for saying that we must work effectively to open our doors more completely, so that we allow poorer countries the opportunity to trade their way out of poverty, but surely the right hon. Gentleman accepts that if we are to exercise genuine influence in a debate on trade policy, it behoves us to work constructively and effectively with our European partners.
	Notwithstanding the fanfare of today's announcement about new campaigns, given that trade is a competence of the European Commission, I struggle to understand how it assists the endeavours to build a genuine coalition for fair trade within the European Union if only one party in one single country is willing to identify itself with the modern Conservative party. Surely that powerfully makes the case for the Conservative party to stay within the European People's party alliance, which allows mainstream voices in the European Union to be heard. If one limits oneself to speaking to a particular Czech nationalist party, which, as I understand it, does not even accept the existence of climate change, one's leverage and purchase in debate on trade policy will be commensurately diminished.

Douglas Alexander: That is a valid point. I draw on my own experience as the former Europe Minister during the British presidency. During that time, and immediately preceding the British presidency, in the run-up to Gleneagles, members of the Government worked very hard indeed to secure widespread support, particularly among the A10, the newer members of the European Union, who for historical reasons were not as familiar with the cause of development in Africa, in particular, as some of the older members of the European Union, to secure genuine cross-European Union support, especially to double aid to Africa.
	In many ways that seems a model of the work that we need to do. Of course we should work effectively with our European partners to secure a progressive trade policy, but I recognise that that often involves difficult conversations. I remember a particular debate in which I took part in the General Affairs Council when Peter Mandelson, the Trade Commissioner, was seeking a fresh mandate from the Council of Ministers in order to be able to negotiate on behalf of the European Union. At that meeting I was obliged to speak forcefully from the British seat against a proposal from the French Government that would have effectively bound the hands of the Trade Commissioner ahead of a critical stage in the negotiations.
	The hon. Gentleman's experience as Chair of the Select Committee and his familiarity with European issues would, I hope, convince him, as those experiences convinced me, that in order to have influence with those European partners, we need to be inside the room exerting influence, rather than choosing to be outside the room deciding to launch a campaign or to protest.
	In many poor countries, the aid about which I spoke earlier is a much needed catalyst for development, but in no country will aid be sufficient. As I am sure we all agree, economic growth is the surest path out of poverty, and trade is crucial to growth. That is why my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has made clear his determination that the Government will
	"align aid, debt relief and trade policies to wage an unremitting battle"
	against poverty.
	Delivering the promise of the Doha round remains our priority. We remain committed to finding a multilateral solution to the challenge that we face. The UK was instrumental in the launch of the round, and has kept it at the top of the international agenda ever since. Though the difficulties are real, the potential gains for the poor from a successful conclusion to the Doha round are huge. At the same time, we must also help developing countries to improve their ability to trade effectively. The investment climate facility for Africa, launched last year with $30 million of UK funding, uses the expertise of the private sector to help Africa become a better place in which to do business. The Government have therefore pledged to spend $750 million a year on aid for trade by 2010.
	But the benefits of trade and growth for the poor can be realised only if we also tackle perhaps the greatest threat facing development, the challenge of climate change. Dealing with climate change is a clear priority for the Department for International Development. We are working across Government towards an international agreement on a cap and trade system which will reduce emissions and help developing countries on to a path of lower carbon growth by providing financial incentives.
	The Department is also helping developing countries to preserve their vital ecosystems. Our contribution of £50 million to a new Congo rainforest conservation fund is intended to help prevent the double tragedy of that forest's deforestation, for 50 million people depend on it for their livelihood, and we all depend on it as a second lung of the world.
	Yet international action on shared challenges such as climate change, securing growth or securing fair trade, require effective international institutions. We accept that the international system today was created for the second half of the 20th( )century, not the first half of the 21st. That is why the report of the UN high level panel on system- wide coherence, in which my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister took part, is so important and points the way forward for the United Nations in the area of development. The UK has long pressed for UN reform, and I can assure the House that that will remain a priority for the Government.
	When I met Bob Zoellick, the incoming president of the World Bank, the week before last, I underlined to him the importance that the Government attach to working with the World Bank as one of the key multilateral institutions.

Lynne Featherstone: When I first assumed my Front-Bench position and met all the non-governmental organisations and people who populate the world of international development, I formed the impression that the former Secretary of State for International Development walked on water—I am sure that the current one will follow—in as much as DFID has vast amounts of money to give out to a great number of countries and causes. However, as an Opposition party we need to establish whether, in terms of those billions that go to the developing world, we are spending our money well. Do we get bangs for our bucks? Is the funding delivering? Is it being spent in a way that addresses global poverty, not just in terms of the great humanitarian need of sustaining life, but in terms of moving from poverty and dependence to independence, which must ultimately be our aim?
	This is a pretty consensual portfolio to have. I think that we would all agree that Make Poverty History was a phenomenal campaign whereby people across the developed world joined hands to put pressure on their Governments to make them give substantive promises at the G8 at Gleneagles. Great Britain can hold its head high in some respects. We provided £6.85 billion in aid last year—an increase from 0.47 to 0.52 per cent. of gross national income—although that is still some way short of the 0.7 per cent. target. Other promises, particularly from other countries, remain undelivered. Indeed, the Africa Progress Panel, headed by Kofi Annan, claimed that the western world is only 10 per cent. of the way towards fulfilling its Gleneagles commitments. In 2006, for the first time in a decade, total aid from the west fell.
	I welcome this debate. It is a timely reminder of the progress we have made and the challenges that remain, coming as it does at the mid-point between the setting of the millennium development goals and the 2015 deadlines. It is now becoming increasingly obvious that those goals will not be met—at least, not by many countries. Liberal Democrats are committed to a target of 0.7 per cent. of GNI by 2011 at the latest; it was a manifesto pledge. I was pleased to read the first recommendation of the Conservative review because it shows that they agree that the 0.7 per cent. target should be met sooner than 2013, although today's motion does not make that leap.
	I want to address three key issues that are pre-eminent in the fight against global poverty: the nature of sustainable development, the tackling of corruption and climate change. If we do not make the tackling of those our priority, we shall fail in perpetuity to lift poor and vulnerable countries out of dependence, poverty and misery. As has been discussed already, we must remove unfair trade barriers against low-income countries. I hope that it is obvious that a key objective of international trade policies has to be to stimulate sustainable development, because no country has ever been lifted out of poverty by aid alone. An over-reliance on debt relief and aid leads to an unhealthy dependence, which creates a vicious circle that can be impossible to escape from.
	As the Secretary of State said, it is vital that we reinvigorate the Doha talks to ensure a positive outcome for developing countries. We must reduce agricultural subsidies and trade barriers to guarantee a level playing field for all. The World Trade Organisation operates on a principle of one country, one vote, but we fail to give the poorest nations a voice in international trade negotiations.
	It is easy to blame the international community for the desperately unjust situation we are in, but we also need to look a bit closer to home. The European Union's record on free trade is deplorable, despite our best efforts. I cannot help thinking that our real chance to push that issue home was when we had the presidency of the EU in 2005. We have to help developing countries to build up their economies and civil society so that they can move away from dependency. China and India have pulled huge portions of their populations out of poverty through economic growth, which has primarily been driven by international trade. We also have to realise that it is in our own interest to liberalise the trade agenda. Farming subsidies come out of the public purse; taxpayers' money is being diverted away from where it is most needed in order to fill the pockets of a small, but powerful minority.
	Another part of the motion on global poverty mentions the need for
	"independent accounting as well as increased independent scrutiny of the United Kingdom's aid budget".
	We think that that is a very good idea, but corruption robs the aid budget of so much of its full value. We need to make sure that our money is delivering, and that the 10 per cent. take all the way along the line is stopped in its tracks.
	Aid donors can take four direct actions to strengthen the hand of political leaders in developing countries that need help in reducing corruption, as well as some less direct measures. First, there is a need to tighten up procurement rules, in terms of the legal framework and the rules on the use of aid. Corruption can add 20 to 100 per cent. to the cost of our aid. Obviously, it is easier to tackle the rules than the legal framework—the World Bank, EU and Department for International Development rules have significant loopholes or latitude.
	On another tack, as has been mentioned, there are lots of ways to trace the siphoning off of funds, but efforts at identifying the beneficiaries often appear half-hearted. The World Bank and others use specialists to trace funds. We can see how much Mobutu and Marcos money has been recovered after the fact. If Governments, including Her Majesty's Government, possess or can get such information about how and where money has been siphoned off, why do they not act? We must track down criminals and recover the money.
	We also appear to lack the will to use international law and United Nations institutions. Many developing countries are now signatories to the UN convention that requires an anti-corruption institution. Yet many signatories barely comply with the letter or spirit of the convention in practice or in law. There is much scope for extra leverage by donors if they help such fledgling institutions become robust.
	Even more problematic, much corruption in developing countries is legal. It ranges from the absence of a prohibition on Ministers owning companies that are recipients of hugely inflated contracts to permissiveness in capital markets, which enables Ministers, parliamentarians or officials to benefit directly from privatisations, bond issues and share acquisitions. That must change if we are to tackle corruption. We should be in there, helping strengthen anti-corruption measures with a review of a host of matters, from bribery to anti-competition laws; from insider trading to state governance.
	We need to start from the bottom up. Donors should channel more funds through local government because that can strengthen vital local democracy. Much large-scale corruption occurs via singular central elites, and that leads to the so-called "necessity" of single tribes or ethnic groups grabbing control of the reins of central Government. One central target that holds all the power and wealth of a nation is a much greater danger than local government responding to local needs and demands. Clearly, strengthening local governance and local democracy, and concentrating on the grass roots would cut corruption.
	I have been able to cast only a brief glance over the weighty tome that is the Conservatives' policy review, which was launched today, but it contained little mention of local government and the importance of channelling funding, especially economic development, at the level of the company, the firm and the local market. If we are serious about strengthening countries through help to help themselves, local governance and local democracy is a must to defeat corruption. Simply monitoring and watching corruption and knowing that it exists is not enough.
	A couple of months ago, Results UK arranged for me to meet a woman from Kenya called Lucy. She told me that, in Kenya, money from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria had been suspended because the Kenyan Government had failed to disburse the previous grants. It was only through grass-roots action and pressure from civil society groups such as hers that those blockages were removed—the Kenyan Government had to respond to the local demand for honesty. The Kenyan national TB programme could then continue its work.
	Sadly, advising on the necessary steps to tackle corruption abroad seems a bit rich coming from us at the moment. We can tackle corruption only if we are squeaky clean in our dealings across the world. Now is not the best time for us to hold up our heads.
	I want to consider an issue that hon. Members of all parties have acknowledged to be overwhelmingly important for the developing world: the threat of environmental degradation. I am upset that our amendment was not selected, but grateful that Labour and Conservative Members commended it.
	Catastrophic climate change is not the only environmental problem but it is, clearly, the most urgent one, especially for poor countries, which are constrained in their ability to react to a rapidly changing climate. Climate change will hit the poorest and the most vulnerable countries in the developing world first. A recent WWF report demonstrated that, of all the millennium development goals, the goal on environmental sustainability—MDG 7—is the only one for which the overall position is getting worse rather than better.
	Although the poorest people in the world have done least to cause climate change, they are the ones predicted to be worst affected. Poor people depend most directly on the services delivered by natural resources and ecosystems. They depend on them for food, fibre, water, fuel and income. The developed world, which is mostly responsible for climate change, should therefore help the developing world with adaptation. Applying the "polluter pays" principle, the developed world has an obligation to help poor and vulnerable countries to adapt to climate change. Therefore, we need in partnership to find additional funding for adaptation. The UK should perhaps take a lead on that, because we are one of those countries responsible for much of the pollution.
	Judging from the Government's past performance, as well as from my first impressions of the Conservatives' report, I am not convinced that there is a real urgency about addressing the need for action. The Make Poverty History campaign was a brilliant example of civil society action to put pressure on the G8, but I wish that equal efforts had been made on the other G8 priority of that year—climate change. Uncontrolled climate change will undo all the good that debt forgiveness or higher aid can deliver. The hon. Member for Stone (Mr. Cash) is no longer in his place, but it is good, as he said, that the G8 agreed to a UN-sponsored process on climate change.
	However, there is in fact already a process: the Kyoto protocol, which involves all the key developing countries. If President Bush had been serious about wanting to involve the US in climate talks, all he needed to do was to ratify the Kyoto protocol and join the ongoing talks about targets for the second commitment period, post 2012. Developing countries also need to accept emissions reductions. Equally, however, we cannot expect them to do that unless the industrial countries move further and faster. That principle is written into the UN framework convention on climate change, which almost every country has ratified, including the US.
	International institutions also need to adapt much more urgently to the new world of an increasingly unstable climate. The World Bank still does not pay enough attention to the issue and the International Monetary Fund almost none at all. Similarly, the World Trade Organisation treats environmental issues as an unimportant sideshow. It is notable that the environmental components of the Doha agenda have been all but abandoned. We must work for universal climate-proofing of development assistance if we are to ensure that climate change is mainstreamed in development programmes and initiatives. That is going to require co-ordination among the World Bank, the IMF and the OECD group of export credit agencies, to ensure that development objectives fully support climate change mitigation.
	In conclusion, development will be impaired, reduced, slowed and diminished, and we will not get value for money if we continue to refuse to liberalise trade. Our spend must be delivered effectively, which means tackling corruption, not just saying that we are tackling it. The driving imperative of development, in all its incarnations, must become inseparable from the environmental cataclysm that is climate change.

Hugh Bayley: We are halfway between the year 2000, when the millennium development goals were set, and 2015, when the aim is for them to be implemented. This month the UN published its 2007 report on the millennium development goals, which records substantial but uneven progress. For instance, the proportion of people living in extreme poverty—on less than $1 a day—has fallen from a third of the world's population in 1990 to less than a fifth now. If that trend continues, that goal will be met globally at least, but not in every region of the world. A great deal of the progress that has been made is down to the economic growth of one particular country—the world's most populous country, China. China's per capita income in 1979 was $210; last year it was $1,750.
	China is the world's workshop. Eighty per cent. of the world's photocopiers are produced there, as are 60 per cent. of its mobile phones and half of all its computers and textiles. It is a sleeping giant that has woken up. Economically, it is doing well, although it still faces major development challenges relating to halting and reversing the HIV and AIDS infection rates, to gender inequality and to access to safe water and sanitation, on which its performance is on a par with some of the poorest countries in Africa. Inequality is rising extremely fast in China. It is a more unequal country than the United States of America. These are some of the problems that the Chinese communist party congress will address this autumn, and the National People's Congress—China's attempt at a Parliament—will discuss them when it is called together again in the spring of next year.
	China's growth has profound implications for the global economy and for global development policy. By 2015, the target date for the millennium development goals, China could be a bigger economic partner for Africa than many of the OECD countries. On trade, for instance, China exported less than £1 billion worth of goods to Africa in 1995, yet by 2005, its exports to Africa were worth £11 billion—a twelvefold increase in just 10 years. In the same period, UK and French exports to Africa approximately doubled in value. In 1995, Africa exported £1.26 billion worth of goods to China, which was less than a third of what it exported to the United Kingdom. In 2005, it exported £8.9 billion worth of goods to China, nearly double its exports to the UK.
	The two-way trade between China and Africa—the sum total of their imports and exports—was nearly £25 billion in 2006, and certainly by 2010 and possibly by next year it will reach something like £50 billion. That is approximately the volume of EU trade with Africa. By 2015, China's trade with Africa will certainly dwarf the EU's trade with Africa.
	It is hard to estimate the volume of China's aid to Africa. It is not a member of the OECD's development assistance committee, so it is difficult to compare like with like. Western donors distinguish between aid—official development assistance—and commercial investment, but a great deal of China's commercial investment comes from state banks or state-subsidised companies, so it is extremely difficult to make that distinction. At China's summit with African leaders last year, its president, Hu Jintao, pledged to double China's aid to Africa, although he did not specify what that would mean in cash terms. He did, however, announce credits and preferential loans to Africa with a value of US$5 billion.
	Last year, China committed $8.1 billion of assistance to Angola, Nigeria and Mozambique. To put that in context, last year the World Bank committed some $2.3 billion in new loans to Africa, which is considerably less than the sum committed by China. Chinese aid is often criticised for being tied aid. It involves not only money spent in Chinese companies but includes Chinese labour that goes to Africa to deliver many of its construction projects. China's aid is often linked to its gaining access to natural resources, although, looking back over the years, one cannot say that UK aid or western aid in general has always avoided commercial advantages. Chinese aid is often made conditional on political goals—the One China policy, for instance. The declaration from the China-Africa summit at the end of last year committed all the African leaders present to supporting that policy as part of the deal.
	Some Africans criticise China's aid policy. For example, the Kenyan " Nation" newspaper says:
	"China has an Africa policy, but Africa does not have a China policy... the danger is that China will politely rip off Africa just as the west did".
	However, most African political leaders support what China is doing in Africa—and it is not just those of Sudan, Angola or other states who are in receipt of a lot of Chinese aid because of the raw materials they supply to China's economy. President Festus Mogae of Botswana—a country that most of us would regard as a model of African development and a success story—says:
	"The Chinese treat us as equals, the west treats us as subjects".
	Mauritius is another African success story. Last week, it announced that it had secured $113 million in cheap Chinese grants and loans to develop its roads and telecommunications structures.
	The Commission for Africa identified that western donors had neglected infrastructure. China has identified that, too, but it is moving a great deal faster than we are to provide infrastructure support to African countries. The Sierra Leonean ambassador to China, Sahr Johnny, said:
	"If a G8 country had wanted to rebuild the stadium, for example, we'd still be holding meetings. The Chinese just come and do it."
	Other African leaders make similar comments about the nature of their relationship with China as a donor.
	I believe that China's priorities for Africa are different from ours, but also that it is genuinely committed to Africa's development. China would gain a great deal from working more closely with western donors. We are not in a position to dictate terms to China, but I would like to see DFID building a closer working relationship with the Chinese and inviting China to become an observer at OECD development assistance committee meetings.
	A great deal of World Bank aid still goes to China. As the International Development Committee learned last week, a major loan package to help China to green its energy sector is being negotiated. I warmly welcome that, as China needs that kind of support. Since China has such enormous foreign exchange reserves, I do not think that the World Bank should be a net donor to China. We should invite the country, in view of the size of its foreign exchange reserves, to make a contribution to the next International Development Association replenishment equivalent to the size of the loans it receives from the World Bank and to become a donor, along with other World Bank nations.
	With only nine seconds to go, I must quickly say that we should seek to plug the gaps that Chinese aid does not touch, such as on governance and supporting the capacity of Parliaments in Africa to hold the—

Peter Lilley: It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for City of York (Hugh Bayley), who made a significant speech on an extremely important subject. The issues that he raised are addressed in the report; indeed, he may well find matters of great interest to him there. I am thinking of a paper written by a brilliant young man of Chinese origin, who makes three succinct points. First, we should never miss the opportunity to engage with China on governance issues. Secondly, we should recognise that China will double its aid, so we—the G8—should keep our promises to double our aid. Thirdly, we and our partners should redouble our efforts and co-operate in pursuing governance issues to ensure that they are not undermined by other new donors coming on the scene.
	I am indebted to my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) both for securing the debate and for his masterly exegesis of what is a lengthy report. In delivering that, he has rather relieved me of the obligation that I had intended to fulfil of spelling out what it contains in its 453 pages. Therefore, perhaps I could address matters from a different angle from that which I intended.
	I came to the subject of development many decades ago when, as my mother put it, I had a proper job and I was a development economist working on aid and development programmes in Africa and Asia. At that stage, had someone asked me whether I would still be interested in those subjects and whether we would still be facing so many of the same problems today—some of the countries that I have revisited face even worse levels of poverty than they did then—I would not have believed them. I thought that by now poverty would be history.
	The situation was brought home to me clearly by someone who put it in stark terms. The aid effort began perhaps in 1948 with Harry Truman. Since then, $1 trillion has been spent on aid. Why is not poverty history? One reason is that that sum, although apparently large, is actually not so large spread over half a century and over billions of people. It is a handful of dollars for each poor person each year. Small wonder then that it has not cured the problem. There is every reason for us to increase aid, which I think the House is committed to do. My party, I am happy to see, is committed and has reaffirmed its intention to meet the 0.7 per cent. of GNI target by 2013, or earlier if possible.
	Another reason is that, for much of that period, aid was given largely for reasons other than the alleviation of poverty. The cold war meant that aid was used to buy allegiance rather than to end poverty. Tied aid meant that money was given to subsidise donors' domestic industries, rather than to relieve poverty. Once one reaches that conclusion, that is a good reason to put much more emphasis on the effectiveness of aid, and that is what we do in the report to a considerable degree.
	Although some of those problems have disappeared, for various reasons, ineffectiveness is still built into the governance of aid. Much attention is paid to the issue of governance within recipient countries but not enough to the issue of governance by donor countries. Tanzania has to give 2,400 reports in a single year to donors. It has to meet 1,000 or more delegations from donors. The pressure, weight and burden that is put on such countries by well meaning donors throughout the world is undoing the work that they are trying to achieve. That is why we put forward the proposal for partnership trusts to try to persuade as many donors as possible to give their money through a single channel, and to do so more effectively, efficiently and conveniently for the countries that we are helping through aid.
	Another reason is that a lot of aid is top-down. We in this country recognise that the man in Whitehall does not know best how money should be spent in Swindon. Why do we think that he knows best how money should be spent in parts of Africa or Asia? Therefore, we propose that we should try to move to demand-led funding, and to harness the experience, expertise and knowledge of people in the countries that we want to help by saying, "Bring projects or programmes to us, be you Governments, local governments, companies, non-governmental organisations, or groups in the country." The demand-led fund will provide aid, subject to those projects being the best ways to achieve the ends that the groups put forward, and there being measures of performance and appropriate arrangements for auditing. We want that method to be tried. We hope and believe that it would work, expand and form a more significant part of the funding, or be used by partnership trusts themselves in handling funding for projects that they were carrying out in country.
	A third response can be made to the statement that poverty is not history: for many people it is history. Millions of people do not experience poverty, disease or hunger because they and the countries in which they live have risen out of poverty as aid has worked. Aid has been successful in eradicating diseases—or at least eliminating them from large areas. Among such diseases are smallpox, polio, guinea worm disease and African river blindness.
	One of the great successes in terms of hunger has been the green revolution in Asia. That is why we want there to be an extension of agricultural aid to produce a green revolution in the rain-fed and arid areas of Africa and Asia that were not touched by that first green revolution. We ought to make more of the successes in aid, and build on them. That is another of the report's themes.
	The greatest successes have come about as a result of countries growing economically, and the great motor of such growth is trade. There have been great changes in opinion and a great mobilisation of support for increasing the aid effort and eliminating the burden of debt through campaigns such as Make Poverty History, Live 8 and drop the debt. We want a similar mobilisation of opinion through a campaign by all parties in this country and by all the countries of Europe and the developed world to create real trade opportunities for developing countries.

Susan Kramer: The right hon. Gentleman and I went on the same trip to India when we saw the slums of the textile manufacturers. What does his report say on corporate social responsibility, as we were often told on that trip that western buyers demanding the lowest price was the driver of the worst conditions?

John Bercow: It is great privilege to follow the hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan). The debate was opened by my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) with that combination of intellect, erudition and courtesy that are his defining characteristics and that command the respect of hon. Members on both sides of the House.
	There is no doubt that the fact that more than 1 billion people in the developing world exist—I will not say live—on less than a $1 a day is a scar on the face of humanity that disfigures and in a very real sense diminishes every single one of us. In seeking to tackle that appalling human tragedy and to offer hope for the future, there are three points that at this stage in our proceedings and in our national deliberations we need keenly and authoritatively to address.
	First, if we believe in more aid—we do in each of our respective parties; I have argued for it from the Front and Back Benches, throughout the last Parliament—we must recognise that there is at least as important a duty on us to recognise and fight against corruption. Indeed, I would argue to the Secretary of State in a non-partisan spirit that that obligation is more important at the time of a rising aid budget.
	Of course we want more transparency, accountability, scrutiny, support for Parliaments, exposure of wrongdoing and appropriate punishments. We also have a duty to recognise that corruption must be fought wherever it rears its ugly head, whether it is in the practice of recipient Governments or the behaviour of corporate entities. My right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley) is to be warmly congratulated on the suggestion that we work towards the formulation of an EU common code on this subject, to which individual countries and perhaps businesses would sign up. We should give real teeth to our commitment to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development convention on bribery by translating its essence, spirit and provisions into domestic legislation. That has not happened and it is overdue. There is a compelling case for it and there is now an opportunity for it to happen. I hope very much that it will.
	My second point is that, notwithstanding the efficacy of, and the case for, increased aid, there is a real opportunity to improve economic development and a demand for that. That requires a new focus on, and commitment to, infrastructure in two forms: commercial and physical. I emphasise commercial infrastructure. We should seek to foster the creation of what I would call the institutional infrastructure of competitive capitalism in the developing world. That means the creation of clear systems of property rights; a recognition of the concept of credit; transparent, simplified and intelligible taxation systems; the enforceability of contracts; and courts through which we can give effect to that principle.
	Physical infrastructure is important too. Okay, the past was disappointing. There were failures. Mistakes occurred under successive Governments. Prestige projects went wrong. Too much money was spent and it was very badly accounted for. Scandals resulted. But that does not in any sense reduce—still less obviate—the responsibility upon us now to go forward seeing the merits of decent infrastructure. Without decent roads, decent rail, decent transport and decent communication systems, the aspiration to economic improvement, to individual fulfilment, to national development in the developing world remains just that: an idle aspiration. So, yes, we need to have economic development. That must be a prime objective of British, European, and multilateral aid policy.
	Finally, we must have a massive expansion of trade, because the catalyst that it provides for economic development is potentially enormous. There is a compelling argument for unilateral initiatives, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden has so rightly proposed, and, yes, it is about the removal of trade barriers and the elimination of trade-distorting subsidies. It is also about doing what we give the impression that we intend to do. We must mean what we say and say what we mean.
	I give the example of duty-free and quota-free access. I say to the Secretary of State that it is no good international leaders saying that 97 per cent. of tariff lines will be of benefit to the developing world because there will be duty-free and quota-free access, if the more than 300 individual product lines—the 3 per cent.—that are of most importance to the countries, and offer the most potential benefit, do not form part of the equation. Bangladesh has to be able to export its textiles to the United States, and other countries that specialise in footwear, or, for that matter, fish or leather products, have to be able to sell those products.
	It is time that the developed world ceased its nauseating hypocrisy of preaching free markets while practising protectionism on a truly industrial and breathtaking scale. As a consequence of the failures of multilateral policy and a lack of imagination, too many people in the developing world have suffered too much for too long with too little done to help them. That situation must change, and it will better change with cross-party support in the House and multilateral backing in the international community.

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: It is a privilege to sum up this debate and to pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley) for his seminal work entitled "In it together: the attack on global poverty". That is an apt title and a good place to start. There have been some excellent speeches from the hon. Members for City of York (Hugh Bayley), for Foyle (Mark Durkan), and for City of Durham (Dr. Blackman-Woods), but I am going to concentrate on the speeches made by my right hon. Friends the Members for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) and for Hitchin and Harpenden, and my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry), and on the excellent speech made just now by my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (John Bercow). As always, he was erudite, concise, and said a great deal in the time available to him.
	A consensus is developing across the House about what we need to achieve with the UK aid effort. I used to be chairman of the all-party population and reproductive health group, and long ago there was a campaign to achieve the target of having 0.7 per cent. of gross domestic product given in aid. At long last, the consensus in the House is that we should move towards that target, and one of the very few monetary pledges made by my party is that we should achieve it by the year 2013. Incidentally, that would mean that DFID's current budget of £5.9 billion would rise to £8.6 billion by that date.
	When the Under-Secretary of State for International Development, the hon. Member for Harrow, West (Mr. Thomas), winds up the debate, I hope that he will deal with some of the very serious proposals in this report. We need to use aid money more effectively to lift out of poverty the more than 1 billion who live on less than $1 a day—something that my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham rightly called a scandal. We must all work to that end, and neither the Opposition nor the Government have a monopoly of wisdom about how that can be done. I hope that the Minister will not spend his entire speech trumpeting the Government's marvellous success at achieving that.
	It is critical that aid be effective. To ensure that it is, we must concentrate on what people in recipient countries want. As my hon. Friends have said, that means that we should concentrate on outcomes rather than inputs. Above all, our policy should be intelligible, and easy to operate in the countries for which it is intended.
	I remember having a conversation with the UN ambassador to Sierra Leone, in which he told me about what happened after the election there. We all know that there was a huge campaign and a civil war before the British Government eventually succeeded in getting that country to move towards democracy, but three days after the election the UN agencies wanted to know what the new Government's next 10-year plan was. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden says, we must stop bombarding countries like that with requests and targets—and he used the very good example of Tanzania being required to produce 2,400 reports.
	In the short time available, I want to concentrate on the effectiveness of our aid. As the report proposes, it can be delivered in a simpler way, through partnerships that involve various international donors and Governments acting on a multilateral basis. In that way, we can offer an aid package to countries that is much simpler to operate.
	The hon. Member for City of Durham drew on the experience that she and I gained on our visit to Afghanistan. There, as she will recall, we found that most European Governments give their aid directly to the Government, in a deliberate attempt to bolster that Government's capacity. Sadly, we also found that the US—whose aid budget, estimated at £9 billion this coming year, is by far the biggest—gives most of its aid unilaterally, through USAID. That has caused much confusion, and it would be much better if all donors were to operate in concert.
	I want to press the Minister a little to find out how he sees our part of the EU aid package operating. Does he agree that it should be on a unilateral basis, so that the EU can offer concessions to the poor donor countries? Those concessions could take the form of reducing tariff barriers and obstacles to trade, although we should not expect the poor donor countries to introduce similar cuts themselves, as to do so could leave them devastated. I hope that the Minister will say something about that.
	The second part of the report sets out how trade should encourage growth. Ultimately, it is only through growth that most countries will be lifted out of poverty. Vietnam offers a good example of that. After the war, it was poorer than most African countries, but today it has a flourishing economic base and is about to apply to join the World Trade Organisation—a real success story.
	With effective aid, there is no reason why many African countries should not be able to do exactly the same thing. It was a great sadness to the Opposition that the Government were not able to complete the WTO's Doha round. There is no doubt about it: a successful WTO round will put billions of pounds into developing countries' pockets, so it is one of the most effective ways of lifting countries out of poverty. I hope that, even now, the Government will put every effort into trying to persuade our EU partners to complete the Doha round successfully.
	If aid is to be delivered successfully, it must be seen to be properly scrutinised, and I welcome the proposals for independent scrutiny in the report produced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden. In particular, I welcome the suggestion that Parliament should debate our proposals on partnerships. It is through debate, scrutiny and proper publication of the goals and aims of each donor project that we can deliver aid more effectively.
	I agree with the Liberal amendment to the motion. Eliminating or reducing climate change is critical, just as aid is, because if we do not try to reduce climate change, we cannot hand on a better world to our children and grandchildren, and I came into politics to do just that. If each and every one of us makes a little bit of difference to the world and passes it on in a better state than we found it, we will have achieved something in our political careers.

Gareth Thomas: I would be negating my responsibility to the House if I did not point out the Conservatives' dismal record on these issues and the weaknesses in the report that they have published. I simply offer these comments in a spirit of helpfulness and friendliness, and a little in the spirit of sadness towards the hon. Gentleman. I have no doubt that if my speech and that of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State are carefully scrutinised, they will help to improve the quality of the continuing debate in the Conservative party.
	Good governance is the reason why South Korea is developing and North Korea is not developing. It is the reason why Botswana, despite all its problems, makes progress and why Zimbabwe, tragically, as the House debated only last week, goes backwards.
	We have achieved a lot over the past 10 years. As I said, our aid budget has trebled. We are making a difference through the way in which our aid is spent. We are helping to ensure that more children in Ethiopia and Ghana are in primary school. We still face huge challenges in terms of the numbers of children—more than 70 million—who are out of school. Those children are denied the most basic opportunities of all—to learn and to read and write, and to have a teacher open their minds to the world beyond the walls within which they live.
	There is an awful lot more to do. We are continuing to work with colleagues across the European Union to encourage them to raise their aid, to deliver on the debt relief commitment that they have made, and make progress on the international trade talks—the Doha round and the economic partnerships agreements that Members on both sides of the House recognise are so crucial if we are to achieve in developing countries the routes out of poverty and to economic stability and growth. That is why I was in Brussels yesterday at a meeting of Trade Ministers, where I made the case for more liberal and simplified rules of origin and for the Commission to make a more generous offer in the Doha round. I suspect that in time a more generous offer will also be needed on economic partnerships agreements. I am sure that the House will be pleased to hear that many Trade Ministers expressed considerable support for that point of view. Although the G4 talks at Potsdam were not as positive as we would have liked, the gaps have narrowed considerably.
	However, there is more work to do. That is why my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has already spent a considerable amount of time and effort in talking to President Bush and to key figures in Brazil and other parts of the developing world who are engaged in these talks. He has been talking to Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, and to others in the European Union, looking to galvanise new momentum into the talks—

Jamie Reed: This is the second time that I have raised in the House the issue of the future of health services in west Cumbria, the first time being in December 2005. Almost two years later, there has been some meaningful progress in the provision of health services in the area and the Government continue to provide record levels of investment, but much more still needs to be done. The reason for applying for this debate tonight is because in September, when Parliament will not be sitting, a consultation on the reconfiguration of health services in west Cumbria and Cumbria generally will begin. That consultation has been dubbed the grand plan. With that in mind, it is essential that, on behalf of my constituents and those of my hon. Friend the Member for Workington (Tony Cunningham), health service users and health care professionals alike, certain expectations are now set out, listened to and fully understood.
	Those expectations relate to health services across west Cumbria, the services provided by the West Cumberland hospital, the scope and timescale of the consultation, the need for all sections of west Cumbrian society to be able to take part in that consultation and for the opinion of local medical professionals to be listened to in the process of service design. In December 2005, I told the House that anxiety about health services in west Cumbria was seemingly endemic, that the people of west Cumbria had harboured deep anxieties concerning the local health services for well over 20 years and that their fears—my fears—are long held and not simply in response to any given public debate about the NHS at any given time. That is still the case.
	Ever since I can remember, the people of west Cumbria have had to fend off one threat or another to the services provided by their hospital. For more than 20 years now,  The Whitehaven News has reported on what has appeared to be a perpetual threat to our hospital services—most recently through the excellent save our services campaign, which has provided so many local people with an opportunity to have their voices heard. Like my constituents, I want an end to the threats. I want us to be free of the threats and free of fear, and that is what I expect the forthcoming consultation to provide.
	The Minister will no doubt be aware of the background to tonight's debate and the imminent consultation. West Cumbria is a unique area which provides unique health policy challenges. With approximately 160,000 people, west Cumbria is both urban and rural: the majority of people live in urban areas, but in small urban areas separated from other urban areas by vast tracts of rural expanse that themselves contain numerous small rural villages. Population centres are widely dispersed, the communications infrastructure is poor, public transport is poorer still and car ownership is low. In addition, west Cumbria is host to perhaps the most strategically sensitive industrial installation in this or any other country—Sellafield. Put simply, there is no off the shelf solution for the health policy issues facing west Cumbria. Our unique situation requires unique policy solutions and there are no people better placed than the service users and service providers of health care in west Cumbria to produce and implement the solutions. Inevitably, that will require change of some kind, but it must be change for the better.
	It is clear that change in the NHS is incredibly hard to achieve for a number of reasons. The size of the organisation means that change is complex, difficult and expensive. The nature of health care means that expert bodies will often violently disagree about the best way forward. The new Secretary of State has recognised all of that, identifying where the Government have got their approach wrong in the past, where they failed to listen to professionals and where they pursued change too quickly. The Secretary of State has called for a period of calm and stability in the NHS and the Prime Minister—the man responsible as Chancellor of the Exchequer for trebling the budget of the NHS—has said that the NHS is his immediate priority. Both approaches are exactly right for the health service in west Cumbria at this moment in time, but I would go further still.
	For almost four years now, the health economy of Cumbria has endured a series of consultations, reviews, reorganisations and reconfigurations. The pace of that process has been painful and the objectives very often unclear. The grand plan consultation must avoid the mistakes of the past and bring an end to the uncertainty and confusion.
	I mentioned at the outset of this debate that there had been some meaningful progress in the west Cumbrian health economy. I shall give details of some of that progress. The West Cumberland hospital opened in 1964 and it was the first new hospital to be built in Britain after Labour's creation of the NHS. I am proud of this fact. I am proud too of the staff who work there, their care and commitment, their devotion and their absolute professionalism.
	I am pleased that the West Cumberland hospital is among the best in the country at preventing MRSA infections. I am pleased that our hospital trust has achieved two-star status. I am pleased that the independent Healthcare Commission reports that standards of care at our hospital are rated as good, and improving all the time. I am pleased that staff in the NHS are being paid better than ever before; they waited a long time for that and they deserve every penny.
	In west Cumbria, we have been promised a new acute district general hospital. Our community hospitals in places such as Millom, Keswick, Cockermouth, Maryport and Workington have been saved thanks to the efforts of my hon. Friend the Member for Workington and me, facilitated by an additional £18.5 million cash injection from the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, over and above the record investment made by the Government. I record my thanks to my hon. Friend, who continues to stand shoulder to shoulder with me as we work to improve the health services of west Cumbria. By convention he is not allowed to speak in this place but he makes up for that outside.
	Cynics decry the record investment that Labour has put into the NHS. By cynics, I mean those who want to destabilise the NHS by claiming that increasing investment serves no purpose and worse, in the case of the Conservatives, those who want to cut NHS spending as part of their £21 billion-worth of public spending cuts. However, I am delighted that the Government are investing unprecedented amounts in health services in west Cumbria and in Cumbria as a whole. When I last debated these issues, local NHS spending had risen by 97 per cent. since Labour came to power.
	In addition, in April, the North West strategic health authority, which covers Cumbria, saw its budget rise by 9.3 per cent.—an increase of £878.2 million. At the same time, the Cumbria primary care trust received a 9 per cent. increase in revenue funding—an increase of £56.6 million—taking the revenue budget for the PCT from £632.5 million in 2006-07 to £689.2 million for this financial year, which is the 29th largest increase of the 152 PCTs in England.
	The increase comes at a particularly appropriate time, as it means that more money is available to the PCT with which to commission services in west Cumbria, in particular at the West Cumberland hospital, than ever before. That increase in funding must be reflected in the PCT's grand plan and in the design of services provided at either the West Cumberland hospital or a new acute hospital for west Cumbria. The sum of £56.6 million should go a long way in west Cumbria and having been given that additional money, the PCT must act equitably and responsibly to ensure that the grand plan delivers for west Cumbria and west Cumbrians. But that is not enough.
	Despite those real improvements and unquestionable investments, I want our services to improve further still—they have to—and it is through the grand plan that I expect the improvements to be realised. When the new Cumbria PCT was brought into being, it promised, through its grand plan, to bring to an end the corrosive doubts about services. The plan is designed to be a final examination of all health services provided across the whole county of Cumbria, with a view to improving services and accessibility to services, driving up clinical standards and achieving clinical and financial sustainability.
	I welcome the motives underpinning the plan. However, a great deal of work needs to be done with regard to the plan in terms of its time scale, scope, process and the involvement of medical professionals and the public. I hope the Minister will outline for the benefit of my constituents exactly how she now expects the Cumbria PCT to facilitate that.
	It is appropriate at this stage to welcome, in principle, the recently announced NHS next stage review to be undertaken by Professor Darzi. The terms of reference for the review state that it will be clinically driven, patient centred and responsive to local communities. The review seeks to deliver NHS services centred around clinical decision making, improved joined-up patient care, more accessible integrated care and a
	"health service based less on central direction and more on patient control, choice and local accountability and which ensures services are responsive to patients and local communities".
	Professor Darzi will publish an interim report in October and a full report next year, but I want the west Cumbria grand plan to incorporate those objectives now. I will not countenance another review of services in west Cumbria inadvertently caused by the Darzi review, so can the Minister assure me that she will ensure that the grand plan for health services in west Cumbria will now take account of the Darzi review terms of reference?
	I can think of no better précis of how the people of west Cumbria would like their health services to be configured than that outlined in Professor Darzi's terms of reference. When I speak to clinicians and medical professionals they tell me that they want to ensure that their abilities and skills are channelled into meeting local needs. Service users, young and old, on urban estates and in rural villages, tell me that they want a health service that is responsive to the needs of their local community. Expectant mothers tell me increasingly of their desire for choice and everyone—particularly those in the throes of a public consultation—is energised by the need for local accountability in their local health service. Decision making in the NHS cannot always be described as transparent, but transparent, honest and open the grand plan consultation must be.
	I could talk at length about a number of key health services in west Cumbria which in themselves would easily fill the time allocated for this debate. I could talk about the need for drastic improvements in dentistry provision, or the real need to address the implementation of local mental health services, or the importance of accident and emergency services at West Cumberland hospital. I expect the grand plan to address all of those, but I wish to talk tonight about consultant-led maternity services at the West Cumberland hospital—not because my wife is seven months pregnant and due to give birth there in September, but because as a service, it underpins so much of what other acute service provision must encompass in a general district hospital like West Cumberland hospital.
	Perhaps more importantly, this is about social justice. Centralisation of maternity services in my constituency does not mean the same as it might for other colleagues in all parts of the House. We are not talking about moving services six, seven or eight miles away in this instance, but 42 miles—42 miles of road between Whitehaven and Carlisle, characterised by steep undulations, blind corners, slow-moving heavy freight and agricultural traffic.
	I believe that the case for maintaining those services at the West Cumberland hospital is irrefutable. A convincing case has never been made for the centralisation of obstetric services in Carlisle; on the contrary, there is a clear and irresistible case against centralisation. This case is now supported by national experts, national guidelines and clinical practitioners. I have spoken with service users, special interest groups, national experts and clinicians since centralisation was suggested, and have found, with very few exceptions, widespread opposition to the suggestion.
	The case for retaining a consultant-led maternity unit at West Cumberland hospital and its potential replacement is based on a number of factors. West Cumbria's birth rate is rising. It continues to rise and is on an upward trend. Last year the hospital delivered 1,330 babies—an increase of 3.7 per cent. on the previous year. The national increase is currently 1 per cent. In 2002, the hospital delivered 1,163 babies. The number of deliveries has risen by 167 over a four-year period—an increase of almost 13 per cent.
	The performance of the consultant-led maternity unit at West Cumberland hospital is impressive. The perinatal mortality rate at the hospital is steadily declining. In fact, the latest figures show that the figures for the hospital are significantly better than the national average. The latest available UK figures, for 2003-04, show an average perinatal mortality rate of 8.2 births per thousand births. In 2006, the perinatal mortality rate for West Cumbria was 4.5 per thousand births.
	Consultant-led maternity units are safer and more cost-effective than midwifery-led units. In June 2006 the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence published draft guidelines on intrapartum care. NICE found that although midwifery-led units were cheaper to operate, consultant-led units were more cost-effective. NICE also identified a higher perinatal mortality ratio of 7.2 to 7.8 per thousand deliveries in MLUs, as opposed to a rate of 5.1 per thousand deliveries in consultant-led units.
	Centralisation would lead to inequalities of access to care and remove the choice of West Cumbrian women. The national service framework for children, young people and maternity services published in October 2004 states that
	"care should be provided within a framework that enables easy and early transfer of women and babies who unexpectedly require specialist care."
	The emergency ambulance "blue light" transfer time between West Cumberland hospital and the Cumberland infirmary in Carlisle is now one hour 42 minutes. Currently, most women giving birth in north Cumbria are within 35 minutes of obstetric care; meaning that centralisation would increase this time by almost 200 per cent.
	Centralisation would also mean that west Cumbrian women were necessarily either classified as high or low risk, with all high-risk patients being immediately transferred to a centralised obstetric unit. That removes choice, in direct contradiction of Government policy.
	In addition, the vast majority of west Cumbrian women require obstetric intervention in labour. Obstetric risk prediction is exceptionally difficult. This risk is mitigated by births taking place in an obstetric unit, where most eventualities can be catered for. Of the 1,330 births at West Cumberland hospital last year, the vast majority required obstetric intervention. Given the imprecise nature of obstetric risk prediction, the World Health Organisation has recommended:
	"In order to significantly reduce maternal mortality, all pregnant, labouring and recently delivered women must have access to essential obstetric care should complications arise."
	Centralisation would mean approximately 1,000 west Cumbrian women per year being transferred to Carlisle to give birth.
	Distance matters: women more than 15 miles from an obstetric unit face hugely increased risks. The British journal of gynaecology published studies in 2002 which identified that living more than 15 miles from a maternity hospital was one of the most important variables in cases of maternal mortality.
	Perhaps more importantly, the Cumbrian health infrastructure cannot accommodate obstetric centralisation. The centralisation of obstetric services at Carlisle would distort the finances and resources of the local NHS. Significant new investment in human resources and the physical infrastructure would have to be made to the Cumberland infirmary to accommodate approximately 1,000 new cases every year, and the most likely effect is that the necessary financial and human resources would be diverted from the West Cumberland hospital or its replacement.
	In addition, national experts refuse to recommend centralisation. Dr. Maggie Blott, author of the North Cumbria Acute Hospitals NHS Trust's obstetric and midwifery service review report wrote that
	"There is no obvious solution"
	with regard to reconfiguring services and was unable to recommend centralising services in Carlisle. Local lay members of the steering group also refused to recommend centralisation. They wrote that centralisation would do little to address the needs of disadvantaged groups in west Cumbria and that west Cumbrian women would not regard centralisation as either safe or equitable. The national maternity tsar has also acknowledged the unique needs of west Cumbria. In "Making it Better: For Mother and Baby", published in February 2007, Dr. Sheila Shribman wrote:
	"what will be right for Whitechapel will not necessarily work in Whitehaven. There is no optimum number of births to make a unit sustainable."
	This is a very brief synopsis of the weight of evidence against centralisation. These decisions will be made locally. I have put this argument to Cumbria PCT, and I will pursue the issue relentlessly. Given the weight of the argument and the strength of public opinion, I expect that the grand plan for health service reconfiguration throughout Cumbria will incorporate those views and recognise the unique nature of west Cumbria's health care needs.
	One of the three separate petitions, totalling more than 30,000 signatures, that I have presented in recent months to the House relating to health services in west Cumbria related specifically to consultant-led maternity services.
	In conclusion, I want Ministers to scrutinise the grand plan consultation for Cumbria and ensure that it is transparent, open, honest and accessible. I want Ministers to ensure that, as well as the views of the public, those of the medical professionals will be incorporated in the consultation. In addition, I want Ministers to ensure that socio-economic and national strategic considerations are addressed in the consultation. The consultation must recognise the unique qualities of west Cumbria: pockets of isolated social deprivation, peripherality and the considerable challenges and national obligations provided in the shape of the nuclear industry. West Cumbria provides unique health policy challenges, and that must be recognised. On top of that, I want the consultation to take account of the Darzi review, so that the consultation in west Cumbria is final and not subject to further delay.
	Finally, I should like Ministers to visit the West Cumberland hospital to meet staff and patient representatives to hear their views and to ensure that the PCT takes account of them. The Minister is a former nurse and understands the issues, and I look forward to her response.

Ann Keen: I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Copeland (Mr. Reed) on securing this debate. The future of health services in west Cumbria is of great concern to him, as he has demonstrated on many occasions, particularly in his contribution tonight, and I appreciate the comments that he has made in the House today. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Workington (Tony Cunningham) for all the work that he has done for the health service in the areas that they serve.
	I acknowledge the important role that my hon. Friend the Member for Copeland has played in raising the profile of this issue and in keeping Ministers regularly up to date with progress, with consultations and public meetings. He is a real unsung hero of his area, and his constituents should be very proud of him. I also to pay tribute to the 1.3 million staff who work in the national health service, particularly the staff in west Cumbria who have made an enormous contribution to improving the local NHS and to whom my hon. Friend referred in his speech. Those achievements have been made following the record investment by the Government, from £33 billion in 1997, rising to over £92 billion by 2008.
	My hon. Friend made great reference to the review of services and how we deliver health care. That is absolutely paramount for the future. Of course, he also referred to my noble Friend Professor Ara Darzi and the way that he will conduct the review of our health services. I understand that my hon. Friend has been in great conversation recently with the chief executive of NHS North West to discuss this issue and particularly funding. I ask my hon. Friend to keep me updated on all the consultations, because they are paramount to the future of health services in the area.
	The newly formed Cumbria primary care trust had an out-turn deficit of £36 million at the end of 2006-07 and it is intended to look at a whole new system of undertaking in relation to financial viability, so that the health service in the area is fit for purpose but also effective and affordable.
	My hon. Friend mentioned the anxiety and fear that surround any change to health services. I relate to that, because sometimes not everybody in the area plays fair on a consultation. Fear and anxiety for patients, potential patients and staff who work in the NHS must be brought to a conclusion soon.
	The review is looking at acute hospital services, and mental health and community care services. The aim is to achieve a better use of clinical resources while keeping services close to people. The Department's gateway review team gave its initial assessment of the process and Cumbria primary care trust is working to address the points highlighted by the review team. The public consultation on proposals emerging from the review is now planned for September of this year. The proposals for the future shape of health services across Cumbria will be shaped by the findings of the feasibility work done following the previous Morecambe bay consultation, and by the commitment given by Cumbria primary care trust to North Cumbria Acute Hospitals NHS Trust to provide a new hospital in west Cumbria.
	I note the concerns that my hon. Friend raised and I can assure him that the consultation will be open, honest and transparent, with decisions taken locally which reflect local needs and are based on appropriate clinical evidence. There is no other way for us to go forward with the health service. We should involve everybody.
	My hon. Friend made an important point about the provision of maternity services. He is an expectant parent and I am sure that the whole House understands the sentiment with which he spoke tonight. He makes a valid point about the distance between the two hospitals and the road conditions. I also appreciate the relevance of the national service framework for children, young people and maternity services, which my Department published in 2004.
	It is with regret—especially as my hon. Friend mentioned my former profession—that I have to say that I cannot give him a commitment about what services will be located where. However, it is vital that the issues are debated as part of the consultation exercise and it is appropriate for local people to voice their opinions on matters such as these, which are important to them. I stress the safety element that he raised. I am sure that all Members appreciate the importance that he attached to that.
	My hon. Friend will appreciate that I cannot speculate at this stage on the details of the consultation or indeed its outcome. It is relevant to local people, clinically-led and will be transparent. The debate needs to happen locally and if, in the end, there are concerns about whatever option is preferred, the overview and scrutiny committee can of course refer the matter to the Secretary of State for Health for a final decision. As my hon. Friend may be aware, the Secretary of Sate has already indicated his willingness to refer all reconfiguration proposals that are referred to him to an independent reconfiguration panel. In that way, we can be sure that such decisions, which are of great importance to my hon. Friend and his constituents, properly reflect local clinical considerations.
	The issue of the new hospital is a major concern to my hon. Friend. I am aware that he has had several meetings with officials and Ministers and I commend his commitment to his constituents in pursuing the matter with such vigour. I had a similar experience in my constituency and found that determination wins through in the end. The North Cumbria Acute Hospitals NHS Trust's strategic outline business case to build a new hospital for west Cumbria was approved by the former Cumbria and Lancashire strategic health authority in January 2006. Cumbria primary care trust and North Cumbria Acute Hospitals NHS Trust have given assurances that there will be a new hospital for west Cumbria. However, it is not possible at this stage to give details of location and size, or the services that will be offered, because these will be developed in the context of the whole systems review.
	As noted earlier, the health service review is very important, and Members of Parliament should encourage their constituents to express their views in the consultation process. That process will shape the future of the NHS, which enters its 60th year next year. I understand the concerns outlined by my hon. Friend and I urge him to continue his dialogue with the local NHS in what is still a pre-consultation discussion.
	I have noted the observations made by my hon. Friend and I am sure that he will understand why I cannot comment further, given the proposed consultation process. However, I can assure him that the process will be an open one—and that I would very much like to visit his part of the world, which is noted for its beauty, complexity and uniqueness. It is better see that combination with one's own eyes, as that is the way to greater knowledge.